Pliny the Elder was a martyr to science. In August, 79 A.D., while in command of the Mediterranean squadron, to which he had been appointed by Vespasian, word was brought him that Vesuvius was in a state of eruption. Desiring to investigate the phenomenon, he steered straight for the blazing mountain, pushed on through the rain of hot ashes and pumice-stones, and when advised by the pilot to turn back fearlessly replied, “Fortune favors the brave!” He effected a landing, but only to be suffocated by the sulphurous vapors that proved fatal to so many of the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Pliny was the master-compiler of antiquity; and he was only a compiler, as he himself acknowledged. His Natural History, in thirty-seven books, is a storehouse of quaint lore, according to its author a condensation of two thousand volumes, relating to astronomy, geography, zoölogy, botany, mineralogy, diseases and their remedies, etc. A penchant for the marvellous, which shows him to have been a man of infinite credulity, was a weakness of Pliny; yet his stories were implicitly trusted in the Dark Ages, and many of them reappeared in the tales of the Arabian Nights. A few of his curious statements are subjoined:— ECCENTRICITIES OF NATURE. “Some individuals are born with certain parts of the body endowed with properties of a marvellous nature. Such was the case with King Pyrrhus, the great toe of whose right foot cured diseases of the spleen merely by touching the patient. We are also informed that this toe could not be reduced to ashes together with the other portions of the body. India and Ethiopia abound in wonders. According to Megasthenes, on a mountain called Nulo there dwells a race of men who have their feet turned backward, with eight toes on each foot. On many of the mountains, again, there is a tribe of men who have the heads of dogs; instead of speaking they bark, and, furnished with claws, they live by hunting and catching birds. According to Ctesias, the number of this people is more than 120,000. This author speaks also of another race of men called Single-legs, who have only one limb, but are able to leap with surprising agility. The same people are also called Foot-shadowers, because they are in the habit of lying on their backs, and protecting themselves from the sun by the shade of their feet. At the very extremity of India, near the source of the river Ganges, there is the nation of Mouthless people; their bodies are rough and overgrown with hair, and they cover themselves with a down plucked from the leaves of trees. These people subsist only by breathing and by the odors which they inhale through the nostrils. They support themselves upon neither meat nor drink; when they go upon a long journey, they carry with them only odoriferous roots and flowers, and wild apples, that they may not be without something to smell at. But an odor which is a little more powerful than usual easily destroys them.”