“Its value both as a cure and as a preventive is said to be well known to it. Whenever in its battles with serpents it receives a wound, it at once retreats, goes in search of the antidote, and having found and devoured it, returns to the charge, and generally carries the day, seeming none the worse for its bite.”[5] This, however, is probably a fable of the Hindus. “A toad, bit or stung by a spider, repeatedly betook itself to a plant of _Plantago major_ (the Greater Plantain), and ate a portion of its leaf, but died after repeated bites of the spider, when the plant had been experimentally removed by man.”[6] The medicinal uses of the hellebore were anciently believed to have been discovered by the goat. “Virgil reports of dittany,” says More, in his _Antidote to Atheism_, “that the wild goats eat it when they are shot with darts.” The ancients said that the art of bleeding was first taught by the hippopotamus, which thrusts itself against a sharp-pointed reed in the river banks, when it thinks it needs phlebotomy. If man had not yet learned the medicinal properties of salt, he could discover them by the greedy licking of it by buffaloes, horses, and camels. “On the Mongolian camels,” says Prejevalsky, “salt, in whatever form, acts as an aperient, especially if they have been long without it.” Rats will submit to the gnawing off of a leg when caught in a trap, so that they may escape capture (Jesse). Livingstone says that the chimpanzee, soko, or other anthropoid apes will staunch bleeding wounds by means of their fingers, or of leaves, turf, or grass stuffed into them. Animals treat wounds by licking—a very effectual if tedious method of fomentation or poulticing. Cornelius Agrippa, in his first book of Occult Philosophy, says that we have learned the use of many remedies from the animals. “The sick magpie puts a bay-leaf into her nest and is recovered. The lion, if he be feverish, is recovered by the eating of an ape. By eating the herb dittany, a wounded stag expels the dart out of its body. Cranes medicine themselves with bulrushes, leopards with wolf’s-bane, boars with ivy; for between such plants and animals there is an occult friendship.”[7]