Agatharcides takes notice of
the worm which is formed in the legs, and which insinuates itself there in
such a manner, that it is necessary to wind it out with the utmost caution.
Plutarch ridicules and rejects this story, and says it never has happened,
and never will. But that such a worm exists, and that when it insinuates
itself into the leg it must be drawn out with the utmost caution, lest the
smallest portion of it remain, and thus produce disease, is directly and
fully attested by all the travellers, and particularly by Bruce, who
carried with him to the grave the marks and effects of the attack of this
species of worm.
But the most curious and important portion of the work of Agatharcides on
the Red Sea, relates to Abyssinia; for in this work we meet with the first
genuine characteristics of this nation. He specifies particularly the gold
mines wrought by the kings of Egypt on the coast of the Red Sea;--the
process which they followed to procure and separate this metal;--the
sufferings which the miners underwent in their operations are painted in
very strong language: "The multitude of bones still found in these
excavations, he says, is incredible, of wretches crushed by the falling-in
of the earth, as must naturally happen in a loose and crumbling soil." He
adds a circumstance, to which there are many parallel in our own country,
in those mines which are supposed to have been wrought by the Romans; viz.
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