[21]
But these things, though wonderful, are not so much to be admired as are those beasts that understand the use of numbers and have the power of reckoning, like the oxen about Susa. For there are oxen in that place that water the king’s gardens with portable buckets, of which the number is fixed. For every ox carries a hundred buckets every day, and more you cannot force them to take or carry, would you never so fain; insomuch that, when constraint has been used for experiment’s sake, nothing could make them stir after they had carried their full number. Such an accurate account do they take, and preserve the same in their memory, as Ctesias the Cnidian relates it.
The Libyans deride the Egyptians for the fables which they report of the oryx, which, as they say, makes a great noise upon the same day, at the very hour, when the Dogstar, which they call Sothes, rises. However, this is certain, that all their goats, when that star rises truly with the sun, turn themselves and stand gazing toward the east; which is a most unquestionable argument of that star’s having finished its course, and agrees exactly with the astronomer’s observations.
De sollertia animalium. Plutarch. Boston. 1874.
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