Natural History, Vol. 3

reverberating hatred. Recently, the mother of a man serving in the praetorian guard saw in a dream that she should send to her son, to be taken as a drink, the root of a wild rose—which they call cynorrhodon—having been charmed by its appearance in a thicket the day before. The affair took place in Lacetania, a region in the nearest part of Hispania. It happened by chance that, just as the soldier was beginning to fear water due to a dog bite, the letter arrived urging him to comply with the divine warning; he was saved unexpectedly, as has been everyone else who has since sought similar aid. Elsewhere among authors, the only medicinal use for the cynorrhodon was to treat alopecia of the scalp with the ash of the little sponge that grows in the middle of its thorns, mixed with honey. In the same province, I learned of a stalk discovered there recently on the land of my host, called dracunculus, the thickness of a thumb, with variegated spots like a viper’s, which they claimed was a remedy against the bites of all creatures. It is different from those of the same name which we mentioned in the previous volume, but this one has a different appearance and a further miracle: it emerges from the earth at the first stirring of serpents to a height of nearly two feet, and hides back into the earth along with them. Nor does a serpent ever appear without it being hidden; this gift of nature is sufficiently dutiful in itself, if only it serves to give warning and demonstrate the time of fear.

Of a certain pestilential spring in Germany and Britain, and of the greatest pains of diseases. Chap. III.

Neither are the evils of beasts only for causing harm, but at times also those of waters and places. In Germany, beyond the Rhine, with the camps moved by Germanicus Caesar, in a maritime tract, there was a spring of fresh water—the only one—which, when drunk, would cause the teeth to fall out within two years,