Barth, travelling in Africa, found an English letter which had not reached its destination, used as a charm by a native.[553] Leaving primitive folk and savage peoples, and turning to the great civilized nations of the past, we find the Egyptians, the Chaldæans, Assyrians, and Babylonians not less addicted to the use of amulets, charms, talismans, and philters than their untutored progenitors (assuming with the anthropologists that the savage of to-day represents the primitive people who must have preceded the founders of civilization). The Magi, according to Pliny,[554] prescribed the herb feverfew, the _Pyrethrum parthenium_, to be pulled from the ground with the left hand, that the fevered patient’s name must be spoken forth, and that the herborist must not look behind him. He tells us also that the Magi and the Pythagoreans ordered the _pseudo-anchusa_ to be gathered with the left hand, while the plucker uttered the name of the person to be cured, and that it should be tied on him for the tertian fever.[555] Of the _aglaophotis_, by which some commentators understand the peony (_Pæonia officinalis_), and others the “Moly” of Homer, Pliny says, “by means of this plant, the Magi can summon the deities into their presence when they please.” Concerning the _achæmenis_, he says the root of it, according to the Magian belief as expressed by Democritus, when taken in wine, torments the guilty to such a degree during the night, by the various forms of avenging deities, as to extort from them a confession of their crimes. He tells, amongst other marvels, of the adamantis, a plant found in Armenia, which, when presented to a lion, will make the beast fall upon its back and drop its jaws. The Magi said if any one swallowed the heart of a mole palpitating and fresh, he would at once become an expert diviner. An owl’s heart placed on a woman’s left breast while she is asleep will make her tell all her secrets. For quartan fevers they recommended a kind of beetle taken up with the left hand to be worn as an amulet.[556] The use of scarabs or beetles made of steatite, lapis-lazuli, cornelian, etc., as amulets, dates from the most ancient periods of Egyptian history. In the fourth Egyptian room of the British Museum there are specimens of scarabs, with the names of kings and queens dating B.C. 4400-250. The objects are not in all cases as old as the dates of the sovereigns whose names they bear. “The beetle was an emblem of the god Khepera, the self-created, and the origin and source from whence sprang gods and men. Rā, the Sun-god, who rose again daily, was, according to an Egyptian myth, a form of Khepera; and the burial of scarabs with mummies probably had reference to the resurrection of the dead.”[557]