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AND after an interval our author again expresses  his admiration at the ease with which Apollonius understood the language of animals, and he goes on to tell us the following: " And moreover he acquired of an understanding of the language of animals ; and he learnt this, too, in the course of his travels through Arabia, where the inhabitants best know this language and practise it. For the Arabians have a way of understanding without difficulty swans and other birds when they presage the future in the same way as oracles. And they get to understand the dumb animals by eating, so they say, some of them the heart and others the liver of dragons." In this instance, then, it seems anyhow to have been the case that the Pythagorean who abstained from animal food and could not even bring himself to sacrifice to the gods, devoured the heart and liver of dragons, in order to participate in a form of wisdom that was in vogue among the Arabs. After learning under such masters, how could he attain to their accomplishments otherwise than by imitating their example ? We must therefore add to the teachers whom we have already enumerated the sages of Arabia who taught him his knowledge of augury ; and this no doubt inspired him subsequently to foretell what the sparrow meant when he called his fellows to a meal, and so to impress the bystanders with the idea that he had worked a mighty miracle. Arid in the same way when he saw the freshly-slain lioness with her eight whelps by the side of the road which led into Assyria, he immediately conjectured from what he saw the length of their future stay in Persia, and made a prophecy thereof.