Disputatio physica expendens rationes & caussas, cur plurimi ab esu casei abhorreant

use of crabs was most contrary, yet they found every other type of fish harmless. Now, some meats—pork for some, beef for others, and mutton for some—nature itself does not admit, and if admitted, they digest them with great difficulty. And yet there are those among these who are exceptionally fastidious about chicken. We know a man in this age who very rarely ate bread, and another who never took it as food, a thing so convenient for human nature and entirely suitable for feeding most fittingly, so that you may find not a few who, for some indescribable reason but only by an inherent property of nature, shun this or that in abhorrence, while easily admitting almost everything else." Such are his words. To show these generalities through special examples as well, we first note that some have held fish in general to be abominable. And so that we may say nothing of Pythagoras, whose symbol this was: ichthyon me geuesthai do not taste fish; and not to commemorate the Egyptians, Syrians, and Greeks, of whom Plutarch writes in Book 8, Symposiac Questions, question 8: "Therefore, among the Egyptians, not only and the Syrians, but also among the Greeks, it was a part of holiness to abstain from fish"—some, not indeed by reason of holiness or religion, but on account of a singular idiosyncrasia peculiar constitution, have abstained from all fish. That this happened to himself as a boy is testified by the great Erasmus in