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The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6) cover

The Natural History of Pliny, Volume 3 (of 6)

Chapter 59: CHAP. 56.—THE HAIR OF THE EYE-LIDS; WHAT ANIMALS ARE WITHOUT THEM. ANIMALS WHICH CAN SEE ON ONE SIDE ONLY.
By the Elder Pliny
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Classics of LiteratureHistory - AncientNature/Gardening/AnimalsScience - Biology

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The work assembles systematic observations on animals, insects, and trees, combining natural history with practical notes. It surveys insect forms and habits, including bees, silk‑producing worms, spiders, and parasitic species, and discusses reproduction, classification, diseases, and useful products like honey and silk. It then examines animal anatomy in detail, limb by limb and organ by organ, comparing organs, vital functions, and bodily peculiarities across species. Later sections catalogue trees and exotic plants, describing aromatic gums, spices, frankincense, myrrh, and methods for producing and testing unguents and perfumes, and noting their uses and regions of origin.

CHAP. 56.—THE HAIR OF THE EYE-LIDS; WHAT ANIMALS ARE WITHOUT THEM. ANIMALS WHICH CAN SEE ON ONE SIDE ONLY.

Man has lashes on the eye-lids on either side; and women even make it their daily care to stain them;209 so ardent are they in the pursuit of beauty, that they must even colour their very eyes. It was with another view, however, that Nature had provided the hair of the eyelids—they were to have acted, so to say, as a kind of rampart for the protection of the sight, and as an advanced bulwark against the approach of insects or other objects which might accidentally come in their way. It is not without some reason that it is said that the eyelashes210 fall off with those persons who are too much given to venereal pleasures. Of the other animals, the only ones that have eyelashes are those that have hair on the rest of the body as well; but the quadrupeds have them on the upper eyelid only, and the birds on the lower one: the same is the case also with those which have a soft skin, such as the serpent, and those among the quadrupeds that are oviparous, the lizard, for instance. The ostrich is the only one among the birds that, like man, has eyelashes on either side.