so tenacious of life, that it will continue to fight long after its intestines have been dragged out of its body. When an elephant has happened to devour a chameleon, which is of the same colour with the herbage, it counteracts this poison by means of the wild olive. Bears, when they have eaten of the fruit of the mandrake, lick up numbers of ants.[1786] The stag counteracts the effect of poisonous plants by eating the artichoke. Wood-pigeons, jackdaws, blackbirds, and partridges, purge themselves once a year by eating bay leaves; pigeons, turtle-doves, and poultry, with wall-pellitory, or helxine; ducks, geese, and other aquatic birds, with the plant sideritis or vervain; cranes, and birds of a similar nature, with the bulrush. The raven, when it has killed a chameleon, a contest in which even the conqueror suffers, counteracts the poison by means of laurel. CHAP. 42. (28.)—PROGNOSTICS OF DANGER DERIVED FROM ANIMALS. There are a thousand other facts of this kind: and the same Nature has also bestowed upon many animals as well, the faculty of observing the heavens, and of presaging the winds, rains, and tempests, each in its own peculiar way. It would be an endless labour to enumerate them all; just as much as it would be to point out the relation of each to man.[1787] For, in fact, they warn us of danger, not only by their fibres and their entrails, to which a large portion of mankind attach the greatest faith, but by other kinds of warnings as well. When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it[1788] before-hand, and the spiders with their webs are the first to drop. Divination from birds has been made a science among the Romans, and the college of its priests is looked upon as peculiarly sacred.[1789] In Thrace, when all parts are covered with ice, the foxes are consulted, an animal which, in other respects, is baneful from its craftiness. It has been observed, that this animal applies its ear to the ice, for the purpose of testing its thickness; hence it is, that the inhabitants will never cross frozen rivers and lakes until the foxes have passed over them and returned. CHAP. 43. (29.)—NATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN EXTERMINATED BY ANIMALS. We have accounts, too, no less remarkable, in reference even to the most contemptible of animals. M. Varro informs us, that a town in Spain was undermined by rabbits, and one in Thessaly, by mice; that the inhabitants of a district in Gaul were driven from their country by frogs,[1790] and a place in Africa by locusts;[1791] that the inhabitants of Gyarus,[1792] one of the Cyclades, were driven away by mice;[1793] and the Amunclæ, in Italy, by serpents. There is a vast desert tract on this side of the Æthiopian Cynamolgi,[1794] the inhabitants of which were exterminated by scorpions and venomous ants.[1795] and Theophrastus informs us, that the people of Rhœteum[1796] were driven away by scolopendræ.[1797] But we must now return to the other kinds of wild beasts.