----- It is a peculiar feature in the character of the ancients that they loved to attribute to the inferior animals the first hints of various useful practices. Thus they maintained it was the ass that, by browsing on the extremities of the vine, which only made it bear the more luxuriantly, taught them the art of pruning as well perhaps as that of feeding on the tendrils and tender branches,[1570] which among them were esteemed a delicacy. To manifest their gratitude for this piece of instruction they erected at Nauplia,[1571] a marble statue in honour of this ill-used quadruped, who has seldom, I fear, from that day to this, been so well treated. The rules observed in pruning[1572] resembling those still in use, it is unnecessary to repeat them, though it may be worth mentioning, that the husbandman, who coveted an abundant vintage, was careful to lop his vines[1573] with his brows shaded by an ivy crown. They esteemed it a sign of a fruitful year when the fig-tree and the white vine put forth luxuriantly in spring,[1574] after which they had only to petition the gods against too much rain, or too much drought,[1575] and those terrible hailstorms which sometimes devastate whole districts. Against this calamity, however, they had a preservative, which was to bind an amulet in the shape of a thong of seal-hide or eagle’s wing, about one of the stocks,[1576] after which the whole vineyard was supposed to be secure from injury. The same effect was produced by striking a chalezite stone with a piece of iron on the approach of a storm, and by hanging up in the vineyard a picture of a bunch of grapes at the setting of the constellation of the Lyre.[1577] To repel the ascent of vermin along the trunk it was smeared with a thick coat of bitumen,[1578] imported from Cilicia, while to preserve the branches from wasps a little olive-oil was blown over them.[1579] ----- Footnote 1570: Theoph. Caus. Plant. vi. 12. 9. After the vintage the goat and the camel, among the modern Asiatics, are sometimes let into the vineyard to browse upon the vine. Chandler, i. 163. Footnote 1571: Paus. ii. 38. 3. See, however, another interpretation of the passage in the Tale of a Tub, where the author gravely insists, that, by Ass, we are to understand a critic. Sect. iii. p. 96. Footnote 1572: Cf. Plat. De Rep. t. vi. p. 53. Schol. Aristoph. Eq. 166. See an exact representation of the pruninghook in the hand of Vertumnus. Mus. Cortonens. pl. 36. This instrument was usually put into requisition about the vespertinal rising of Arcturus. Hesiod. Opp. et Dies, 566, sqq. Footnote 1573: Geop. v. 24. Footnote 1574: Theoph. Caus. Plant. i. 20. 5. Footnote 1575: Sch. Aristoph. Nub. 1117. Küst. Footnote 1576: Geop. i. 14. Cf. Sch. Aristoph. Nub. 1109. Husbandmen were accustomed to nail the heads and feet of animals to the trunks of trees to prevent their being withered by the operation of the evil eye. Sch. Ran. 943.