Now all these points, affording as they do the greatest help in the diagnosis and in the cure of disease were entirely passed over by Erasistratus, and he pretended to despise these great men--he who does not despise ordinary people, but always jealously attacks the most absurd doctrines. Hence, it was clearly because he had nothing to say against the statements made by the ancients regarding the function and utility of the spleen, and also because he could discover nothing new himself, that he ended by saying nothing at all. I, however, for my part, have demonstrated, firstly from the _causes_ by which everything throughout nature is governed (by the causes I mean the Warm, Cold, Dry and Moist) and secondly, from obvious bodily phenomena, that there must needs be a cold and dry humour.[288] And having in the next place drawn attention to the fact that this humour is black bile [atrabiliary] and that the viscus which clears it away is the spleen--having pointed this out by help of as few as possible of the proofs given by ancient writers, I shall now proceed to what remains of the subject in hand. What else, then, remains but to explain clearly what it is that happens in the generation of the humours, according to the belief and demonstration of the Ancients? This will be more clearly understood from a comparison. Imagine, then, some new wine which has been not long ago pressed from the grape, and which is fermenting and undergoing _alteration_ through the agency of its contained heat.[289] Imagine next two residual substances produced during this process of alteration, the one tending to be light and air-like and the other to be heavy and more of the nature of earth; of these the one, as I understand, they call the _flower_ and the other the _lees_. Now you may correctly compare yellow bile to the first of these, and black bile to the latter, although these humours have not the same appearance when the animal is in normal health as that which they often show when it is not so; for then the yellow bile becomes _vitelline_,[290] being so termed because it becomes like the yolk of an egg, both in colour and density; and again, even the black bile itself becomes much more malignant than when in its normal condition,[291] but no particular name has been given to [such a condition of] the humour, except that some people have called it _corrosive_ or _acetose_, because it also becomes sharp like vinegar and corrodes the animal's body--as also the earth, if it be poured out upon it--and it produces a kind of fermentation and seething, accompanied by bubbles--an abnormal putrefaction having become added to the natural condition of the black humour. It seems to me also that most of the ancient physicians give the name _black humour_ and not _black bile_ to the normal portion of this humour, which is discharged from the bowel and which also frequently rises to the top [of the stomach-contents]; and they call _black bile_ that part which, through