Having now described all the creations of human ingenuity, reproductions, in fact, of Nature by the agency of art, it cannot but recur to us, with a feeling of admiration, that there is hardly any process which is not perfected through the intervention of fire. Submit to its action some sandy soil, and in one place it will yield glass, in another silver, in another minium, and in others, again, lead and its several varieties, pigments, and numerous medicaments. It is through the agency of fire that stones[2846] are melted into copper; by fire that iron is produced, and subdued to our purposes; by fire that gold is purified; by fire, too, that the stone is calcined, which is to hold together the walls of our houses. Some materials, again, are all the better for being repeatedly submitted to the action of fire; and the same substance will yield one product at the first fusion, another at the second, and another at the third.[2847] Charcoal, when it has passed through fire and has been quenched, only begins to assume its active properties; and, when it might be supposed to have been reduced to annihilation, it is then that it has its greatest energies. An element this, of immense, of boundless[2848] power, and, as to which, it is a matter of doubt whether it does not create even more than it destroys! CHAP. 69.—THREE REMEDIES DERIVED FROM FIRE AND FROM ASHES. Fire even has certain medicinal virtues of its own. When pestilences prevail, in consequence of the obscuration[2849] of the sun, it is a well-known fact, that if fires are lighted, they are productive of beneficial results in numerous ways. Empedocles and Hippocrates have proved this in several passages. “For convulsions or contusions of the viscera,” says M. Varro—for it is his own words that I use—“let the hearth be your medicine-box; for lie of ashes,[2850] taken from thence, mixed with your drink, will effect a cure. Witness the gladiators, for example, who, when disabled at the Games, refresh themselves with this drink.” Carbuncle too, a kind of disease which, as already[2851] stated, has recently carried off two persons of consular rank, admits of being successfully treated with oak-charcoal,[2852] triturated with honey. So true is it that things which are despised even, and looked upon as so utterly destitute of all virtues, have still their own remedial properties, charcoal and ashes for example. CHAP. 70.—PRODIGIES CONNECTED WITH THE HEARTH.