Canidia, with the locks of her dishevelled hair twined round with venomous and deadly serpents, orders the wild fig tree and the funeral cypress to be rooted up from the sepulchres on which they grew, and these, together with the egg of a toad smeared with blood, the plumage of the screech owl, various herbs brought from Thessaly and Georgia, and bones torn from the jaws of a famished dog, to be burnt in flames fed with perfumes from Colchis. One assistant, whose hair stands stiff and erect like the quills of the sea-hedgehog or the bristles of a hunted boar, sprinkles the ground with drops from the Avernus, while another, who is reputed to have had the faculty of conjuring the stars and moon down from heaven, assists in other ways. The fourth witch is busy digging a hole with a spade, in which is to be plunged up to his chin the beardless youth stripped of his purple robe—the emblem of his noble descent—and naked, that from his marrow, already dry, and his liver (when at length his eyeballs, long fixed on the still renovated food which is withheld from his famished jaws, have no longer the power to discern), may be concreted the love potion from which the witches promise themselves the most wonderful results. Canidia, unmoved by his sufferings, works herself into a great rage, and calls upon the night and the morn to help in her infamous incantation. But her victim manages to evade destruction by means of some magical antidote. She then resolves to prepare a still more powerful charm, exclaiming, “Sooner shall the sky be swallowed up in the sea and the earth be stretched a covering over both, than thou, my enemy, shalt not be wrapped in the flames of love as subtle and tenacious as those of burning pitch”. CHAPTER IV. THE FATHERS OF MEDICINE. Though Æsculapius is said to have lived so near to the time of the Trojan war, yet the Greeks knew very little about him. The superstition of the time gave him a position among the gods, and as he was adored under the character of the genius of physic, it came at last to be doubted whether he was ever a mortal; consequently his priests were obliged for their own sakes to make themselves masters of all the physic that the master could teach, that they might be qualified to give advice to those who applied to them; their prescriptions passed for the suggestions of the gods, the cures for the miraculous. But both diseases and remedies were carefully recorded. Strabo tells us that from these registers in the temple of Æsculapius at Cos, Hippocrates formed his plan for a proper diet.