Though the quaintness of some of the ideas we encounter in Pliny raises a smile, yet the real wonder is that he was able to produce a book so excellent, and the more one reads of it the more this truth is impressed upon one’s mind. In many of his ideas he appears to have been far in advance of his age. Thus he distinctly declares that the world is round, and gives lucid reasons for his statement, and in an age of abounding polytheism, when temples innumerable each enshrined the image of some deity, he had the courage to declare that “to seek after any shape of God and to assign a form or image to him is a proof of man’s folly. For God, wheresoever he be and in what part soever resident, all sense he is, all sight, all hearing. He is the whole of the life and of the soul, and to believe that there be gods innumerable, and those according to man’s virtues, as chastity, concord, understanding, hope, honour, clemency, faith, these conceits render men’s negligence the greater.” The unchanging nature of the East that we have, already seen illustrated by extracts from mediæval writers is even visible in the work of this author of nearly two thousand years ago, for Pliny mentions the people called Seres, beyond Scythia, who fly the company of other people and who are famous for the fine silk that their woods yield. There can be no reasonable doubt but that these exclusive folk were the Chinese. He tells us that they collect this silk from the leaves of the trees, and, having steeped it in water, card it: it being a very pardonable error to conclude that this silk was the product of the tree itself rather than of the silkworm that spun its cocoon amongst its foliage. The men have feet of natural size, while the women’s are so small that Pliny’s informant described them as ostrich-footed. Here we can scarcely doubt that the strange custom of the Chinese in binding up the feet of the women is referred to, and granting this it is an interesting proof of the great antiquity of this barbarous proceeding. In India, too, it was reported to Pliny that there were certain philosophers who from sunrise to sunset persevere in gazing upon the sun without once removing their eyes, and from morn to eve stand upon one leg on the burning sand. It is remarkable to observe how exactly these austerities and others of like severity and uselessness are still practised by the Fakirs of India. He tells us too of others who had strange influence over venomous serpents, doubtless the snake-charmers whose descendants still exhibit their skill, and refers to the people of India hunting and taming the elephants and using them as beasts of burden, as valuable aids to locomotion and for purposes of war.