It is highly necessary, however, to advertise the reader, that whereas I have already described the natures of the various animals, and the discoveries[2087] due to them respectively—for, in fact, they have been no less serviceable in former times in discovering remedies, than they are at the present day in providing us with them—it is my present intention to confine myself to the remedial properties which are found in the animal world, a subject which has not been altogether lost sight of in the former portion of this work. These additional details therefore, though of a different nature, must still be read in connexion with those which precede. CHAP. 2. REMEDIES DERIVED FROM MAN. We will begin then with man, and our first enquires will be into the resources which he provides for himself—a subject replete with boundless difficulties at the very outset.[2088] Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators, draughts teeming with life,[2089] as it were; a thing that, when we see it done by the wild beasts even, upon the same arena, inspires us with horror at the spectacle! And yet these persons, forsooth, consider it a most effectual cure for their disease, to quaff the warm, breathing, blood from man himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life; and this, though it is regarded as an act of impiety to apply the human lips to the wound even of a wild beast! Others there are, again, who make the marrow[2090] of the leg-bones, and the brains of infants, the objects of their research! Among the Greek writers, too, there are not a few who have enlarged upon the distinctive flavours of each one of the viscera and members of the human body, pursuing their researches to the very parings of the nails! as though, forsooth, it could possibly be accounted the pursuit of health for man to make himself a wild beast, and so deserve to contract disease from the very remedies he adopts for avoiding it. Most righteously, by Hercules! if such attempts are all in vain, is he disappointed of his cure! To examine human entrails is deemed an act of impiety;[2091] what then must it be to devour them? Say, Osthanes,[2092] who was it that first devised these practices; for it is thee that I accuse, thou uprooter of all human laws, thou inventor of these monstrosities; devised, no doubt with the view that mankind might not forget thy name! Who was it that first thought of devouring each member of the human body? By what conjectural motives was he induced? What can possibly have been the origin of such a system of medicine as this? Who was it that thus made the very poisons less baneful than the antidotes prescribed for them? Granted that barbarous and outlandish tribes first devised such practices, must the men of Greece, too, adopt these as arts of their own?