Natural history in Shakespeare's time : being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it / Made by H. W. Seager, M. B., &c. Also pictures thereunto belonging.

Seager, H. W. (Herbert West), 1848-

Date:: 1896

Credit: Natural history in Shakespeare's time : being extracts illustrative of the subject as he knew it / Made by H. W. Seager, M. B., &c. Also pictures thereunto belonging. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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$or backer parts, wherewithal she infecteth the air, for revenge of them that do annoy her ; and she knoweth the weakness of her teeth, and therefore she gathereth abun- dance of air into her body, wherewithal she greatly swelleth, and then, by sighing, uttereth that infected air as near the person that offendeth her as she can. A Toad useth one certain herb wherewithal it preserveth the sight, and also resisteth the poison of spiders, whereof I have heard this credible history related from the mouth of the good Earl of Bedford. It fortuned as the said Earl travelled in Bedfordshire, near unto a market-town called Owbourn \? Woburn], some of his company espied a Toad fighting with a spider, under a hedge ; and the Earl saw how the spider still kept her standing, and the Toad divers times went back from the spider, and did eat a piece of an herb, which to his judgment was like a plantain ; at the last, the Earl, having seen the Toad do it often, and still return to the combat against the spider, he commanded one of his men to go, and with his dagger to cut off that herb :—presently after the Toad returned to seek it, and, not finding it, swelled and broke in pieces. [This story is better told in Luptofi's Notable Things, bk. vi. § 30, but without the names, and with slight differences.] There was a monk in England who had in his chamber divers bundles of green rushes, wherewithal he used to strew his chamber at his pleasure; it happened on a day after dinner, that he fell asleep upon one of those bundles of rushes, with his face upward, and, while he there slept, a great Toad came and sat upon his lips, bestriding him in such manner as his whole mouth was covered. Now when his fellows saw it, they were at their wits' end, for to pull away the Toad was an unavoidable death, but to suffer her to stand still upon his mouth was a thing more cruel than death ; and therefore one of them espying a spider's web in the window, wherein was a great spider, he did advise that the monk should be carried to that window, and laid with his face upward right underneath the spider's web. And as soon as the spider saw her adversary the Toad, she presently wove her thread, and descended down upon the Toad,—at the first meeting whereof the spider wounded the Toad, so that it swelled, and at the second meeting it swelled more, but at the third time the spider$