Magneticum Naturae Regnum

for it taught the silkworm the methods of making wool, the spider of weaving webs, the bees of constructing honeycombs, the ants of filling storehouses, and finally the swallow of building nests, if not that instinct, or phantastic power, Artifices by which animals operate solely by the instinct of nature. by which each chooses what is good for itself and rejects what is evil? Who taught the hare to fear the dog, and not the stag, though it is more unsightly? Who taught the chick to fear the kite, and not the peacock or the ostrich, though they are larger? Who advised the stag that it is more reliant on fleetness than on strength; who instructed the lion in the use of claws, the horse in that of its heels, so that the former might provide for itself by flight, and the latter by arms, even though horns are greater armaments? Who taught parrots and magpies rhetoric, cynocephali music, bees geometry, swallows architecture, Ogyges astronomy, and spiders the art of weaving? Who showed the ibis the administration of the clyster, the hippopotamus bloodletting, the stags surgery? Who revealed to the tortoise the powers of dittany against serpents, who to the stork the power of rue and origanum, to the snake the power of fennel against the dullness of the eyes, to the swallow the celandine against blindness, to hens and other aquatic birds the cathartic power of pellitory or pimpernel for purging the stomach? That natural instinct alone. If, therefore, brute animals recognize the powers of herbs—whether harmful or beneficial to themselves—by this instinct implanted within them as if by signs, why should man, the end of all things, [not recognize] such hidden powers by his own