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Historia naturalis. See Naturalis historia

Index: Funes el memorioso, El inmortal, Los teólogos.

Fishburn and Hughes: "A rambling scientific treatise by Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) which deals with geography, anthropology, physiology, botany, agriculture, medicine and the arts. Compiled from vast reading, and citing about 500 authors, of whom about 150 were Roman, it is a major source of our knowledge of ancient life. Funes, his Memory, CF 133: the 'odd volume' in the story of Funes probably refers to book 2 where in chapters 3-7 Pliny writes about memory, calling it 'the boon most necessary for life'.. CF 134: 'ut nihil non iisdem verbis redderetur auditum' (7.24) may be translated: 'so that nothing heard can be repeated exactly.' The Immortal, CF 195: Book V, chapter 8, deals with ‘Countries on the Other Side of Africa’. Here Pliny describes the inhabitants of the most remote parts of the North African desert beyond Gaetulia. Among these he mentions the troglodytes who 'dig out caves and use them as habitations, feed on the flesh of snakes, lack the use of language and speak not in words but in shrieks'. Pliny adds that the Garamantes, not having the custom of marriage, spend their time with different women, and that the Augylae only worship the underworld. These lines, referred to as ‘interpolations from Pliny’ are quoted without attribution but almost verbatim in the first chapter of 'The Immortal' as ‘, CF 184-5 The Theologians, CF 203: the passage from book 7 where Pliny observes that no two faces in the universe are alike is to be found in chapter 1: 'human features... are so fashioned that, among so many thousands of men, there are not two in existence which cannot be distinguished from one another.'" (91)