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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1856 Excerpt:...beetle, and a gryphin, and a crocodile and a cat, yet with these animals other priests of the Egyptians associate as most sacred. But they say that they abstain from eating the swine and honour it. For she first cleft the earth with the protuberance of her snout (as they say), and gave the idea of ploughing, and pointed out the work of the ploughshare. From which fact also they say that the name was given to the instrument from the swine. But the Egyptians, cultivating the soft and hollow parts of the country, do not require the plough at all, but when the Nile flows off after wetting the fields, they follow it up and send iu the swine.... But I think that the Jews also, if they abominated the swine, would kill it, as the magi kill mice. But as it is, they hold it forbidden to kill them as much as to eat them. And perhaps it has reason, that as they honour the ass which showed them a fountain of water, so also they reverence the swine which was their teacher of sowing and ploughing: unless, by Jove, some one says that those men abstain from the hare also, abominating it as a filthy and unclean animal. But those men seem to hallow the flesh of swine, because the barbarians especially abominate whitenesses and leprosies, and they think that such diseases prey on men by the attrition But, if we may also adduce mythical stories, Adonis is said to have beeu killed by the swine, and they think that Adonis was no other than Dionysus Bacchus, and many of the rites performed to each in the feasts confirm the account... Do you (says he) 0 Lamprias, ascribe and suggest under the mysteries of the Hebrews, Bacchus the " Eviau woman-exciting deity, blooming with mad honours "?.. In the first place, said he, the season and the mode of the greatest and most perfe...