. See the story of Aristaeus and the
recovery of his bees, in the Fourth Book of Virgil's Georgics,
I. 281-314. It is also told by Ovid in the Fasti, Book I. l. 377.]

[Footnote 40: _The warlike steed._--Ver. 368. Pliny the Elder,
Nicander, and Varro state that bees and hornets are produced from
the carcase of the horse. Pliny also says, that beetles are
generated by the putrefying carcase of the ass.]

[Footnote 41: _Deadly moth._--Ver. 374. Pliny, in the
twenty-eighth Book of his History, says, 'The moth, too, that
flies at the flame of the lamp, is numbered among the bad
potions,' evidently alluding to their being used in philtres or
incantations. There is a kind called the death's head moth; but it
is so called simply from the figure of a skull, which appears very
exactly represented on its body, and not on account of any noxious
qualities known to be inherent in it.]

[Footnote 42: _Deprived of feet._--Ver. 376. He alludes to frogs
when in the tadpole state.]

[Footnote 43: _Not a cub._--Ver. 379. This was long the common
belief. Pliny says, speaking of the cub of the bear, 'These are
white and shapeless lumps of flesh, a little bigger than mice,
without eyes, and without hair; the claws, however, are prominent.
These the dams by degrees reduce to shape.']

[Footnote 44: _Into a serpent._--Ver. 390. Pliny tells the same
story; and Antigonus (on Miracles, ch. 96) goes still further, and
says, that the persons to whom this happens, after death, are able
to smell the snakes while they are yet alive. The fiction, very
probably, was invented with the praiseworthy object of securing
freedom from molestation for the bones of the dead.]

[Footnote 45: _Changes its sex._--Ver. 408. Pliny mentions it as a
vulgar belief that the hyaena is male and female in alternate
years. Aristotle took the pains to confute this silly notion.]

[Footnote 46: _Which feeds upon._--Ver. 411. The idea that the
chameleon subsists on wind and air, arose from the circumstance of
its sitting with its mouth continually open, that it may catch
flies and small insects, its prey. That it changes colour
according to the hue of the surrounding objects, is a fact well
known. It receives its name from the Greek +chamai leon+, 'The
lion on the ground.']

[Footnote 47: _Changed into stone._--Ver. 415