r and the wind.

[Sidenote: On the Flight of Birds]

90.

The reason of this is that small birds being without down cannot
support the intense cold of the high altitudes in which the vultures
and eagles or and other great birds, well supplied with down and
clothed with many kinds of feathers, [fly]. Again, the small birds,
having delicate and thin wings, support themselves in the low air,
which is denser, and they could not bear up in the rarer air, which
affords slighter resistance.

[Sidenote: On the Structure of Wings]

91.

The shafts formed in the shoulders of the wings of birds have been so
devised by ingenious nature {178} as to occasion a convenient pliancy
in the direct impetus which often occurs in the swift flight of birds,
since she found it more practical to bend a small part of the wing in
the direct flight than the whole of it.

[Sidenote: On a Fossil Fish]

92.

O time! swift devourer of all created things! How many kings, how many
nations, thou hast overthrown, how great changes of kingdoms and
diverse vicissitudes have succeeded one another, since the marvellous
body of this fish, which perished in the caverns and intricate recesses
[of the mountain]. Now undone by time, thou liest patient in this
confined spot; with thy fleshless and bare bones thou hast built the
framework and the support of the mountain that is above thee.

[Sidenote: We live by Others' Death]

93.

Unconscious life remains in what is dead, which when reunited to the
stomach of living men, reacquires sentient and conscious life.

[Sidenote: Against Doctors]

94.

Men are chosen to be physicians in order to minister to diseases of
which they are ignorant.

95.

Every man wishes to amass money in order to give it to the physicians
who are the destroyers of life; they ought therefore to be rich.

{179}

96.

Take pains to preserve thy health; and thou wilt all the more easily do
this if thou avoidest physicians, because their drugs are a kind of
alchemy, and there are as many books on this subject as there are on
medicine.

97.

Oh! meditators on perpetual motion, how many vain projects of similar
character you have devised! Go and join the seekers of gold.

[Sidenote: Against the Seekers of Perpetual Motion]

98.

The water which flows in a river moves either because it is summoned or
driven, or because it moves of its own accord. If it is summoned,--and
I mean sought after,--