Appendix to the Books on Plants and Peripatetic Questions

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It is possible to extract an effectively astringent A substance that shrinks or constricts body tissues quality from the wood of the domestic or wild Olive, and from Juniper wood, whose resin is far more effective for digestion. Hippocrates used the boiled shavings of Lotus and Torch-pine to dry up female discharges original: "muliebres fluores". Furthermore, we can easily take the sawdust or scrapings from any wood cut by carpenters with either a saw or an axe, and grind them as previously described. However, those who use the ashes of burnt wood elicit only a salty, alkaline power original: "vim nitrosam", but not the flavor of the wood at all. The medicinal virtues found in more porous matter, such as leaves and fruits, are more easily corrupted, as is the case with woods that are prone to woodworm.

On the Large Melon, the Quince-Melon, and the Small Cucumber.

Chapter III.

Since there has come into my hands a certain short treatise in praise of the Quince-Melon Melopepone: a type of melon shaped like a quince, likely a variety of muskmelon written by the most learned Leonardo Giachini A noted 16th-century Italian physician to your father, Filippo Valori, against someone who was slandering that fruit, it seemed appropriate to add these remarks in confirmation of his opinion. Either the ancients did not know our Quince-Melons, or they were not of the same perfection in which they are found today; whether this happened because of cultivation methods unknown to the ancients, or because their nature changed spontaneously over the course of time, or by their transplantation into other lands, as is written to have happened to many other things. For even today their condition is found to be quite deceptive, so that some turn out to be the best of all fruits to be desired, and are purchased at a high price for the tables of nobles. Others, even from the same garden and the same plant, are neglected and fit only for the common people and beasts of burden. In no other fruit, when it has reached its maturity and has not passed the opportune time for gathering, is such a great difference found as in the Quince-Melon. Rightly, therefore, did the ancients approve of this fruit less. For the less pleasing they were to the taste, the more harmful they were—full of bad juices and prone to rotting—from which they produce flux of the bowels and putrid fevers. I find, however, that Hippocrates condemned them less. For in his book On Affections...