On an examination of the entrails, to find a certain fatty part on the top of the heart, is looked upon as a fortunate presage. Still, however the heart has not always been considered as forming a part of the entrails for this purpose. It was under Lucius Postumius Albinus, the King of the Sacrifices,[275] and after the 126th Olympiad, when King Pyrrhus had quitted Italy, that the aruspices began to examine the heart, as part of the consecrated entrails. The first day that the Dictator Cæsar appeared in public, clothed in purple, and sitting on a seat of gold, the heart was twice found wanting[276] when he sacrificed. From this circumstance has risen a great question among those who discuss matters connected with divination—whether it was possible for the victim to have lived without that organ, or whether it had lost it at the very moment[277] of its death. It is asserted that the heart cannot be burnt of those persons who die of the cardiac disease; and the same is said of those who die by poison. At all events, there is still in existence an oration pronounced by Vitellius,[278] in which he accuses Piso of this crime, and employs this alleged fact as one of his proofs, openly asserting that the heart of Germanicus Cæsar could not be burnt at the funeral pile, in consequence of his having been poisoned. On the other hand, the peculiar nature[279] of the disease under which Germanicus was labouring, was alleged in Piso’s defence. CHAP. 72.—THE LUNGS: IN WHAT ANIMALS THEY ARE THE LARGEST, AND IN WHAT THE SMALLEST. ANIMALS WHICH HAVE NOTHING BUT LUNGS IN THE INTERIOR OF THE BODY. CAUSES WHICH PRODUCE EXTRAORDINARY SWIFTNESS IN ANIMALS. Beneath the heart are the lungs, the laboratory in which the respiration is prepared. The use of these, is to draw in the air and then expel it; for which purpose their substance is of a spongy nature, and filled with cavernous holes. Some few among the aquatic animals have lungs, as we have already stated;[280] and among the rest of those which are oviparous, they are small, of a fungous nature, and containing no blood; hence it is, that these animals do not experience thirst. It is for the same reason also, that frogs and seals are able to remain so long under water. The tortoise, too, although it has lungs of remarkable size, and extending throughout the whole of the shell, is also equally destitute of blood. The smaller the lungs are in proportion to the body, the greater is the swiftness of the animal. It is in the chameleon that the lungs are the largest in proportion to the body; in which, in fact, it has no other viscera at all.[281] CHAP. 73.—THE LIVER: IN WHAT ANIMALS, AND IN WHAT PART THERE ARE TWO LIVERS FOUND.