HKB
As many figures dancing doth propose As waves roll on the sea when tempests toss.
And Chrysippus says that the various complications of ten single axioms amount to 1,000,000. But Hipparchus hath confuted that account, showing that the affirmative contains 101,049 complicated propositions, and the negative 310,952. And Xenocrates says, the number of syllables which the letters will make is 100,200,000. How then is it strange that the body, having so many different powers in itself, and getting new qualities every day from its meat and drink, and using those motions and alterations which are not always in the same time nor in the same order, should upon the various complications of all these be affected with new diseases? Such was the plague at Athens described by Thucydides, who conjectures that it was new because that birds and beasts of prey would not touch the dead carcasses. Those that fell sick about the Red Sea, if we believe Agatharcides, besides other strange and unheard diseases, had little serpents in their legs and arms, which did eat their way out, but when touched shrunk in again, and raised intolerable inflammations in the muscles; and yet this kind of plague, as likewise many others, never afflicted any beside, either before or since. One, after a long stoppage of urine, voided a knotty barley straw. And we know that Ephebus, with whom we lodged at Athens, threw out, together with a great deal of seed, a little hairy, many-footed, nimble animal. And Aristotle tells us, that Timon's nurse in Cilicia every year for two months lay in a cave, without any vital operation besides breathing. And in the Menonian books it is delivered as a symptom of a diseased liver carefully to observe and hunt after mice and rats, which we see now nowhere practised.