Yet none can deny but that the food itself is a partial cause; for not only new fruit, bread, or corn, but flesh of the same year, is better tasted than that of the former, more forcibly provokes the guests, and enticeth them to eat on.
QUESTION III.

WHICH WAS FIRST THE BIRD OR THE EGG?
PLUTARCH, ALEXANDER, SYLLA, FIRMUS, SOSSIUS SENECIO, AND OTHERS.
When upon a dream I had forborne eggs a long time, on purpose that in an egg (as in a heart) I might make experiment of a notable vision that often troubled me; some at Sossius Senecio's table suspected that I was tainted with Orpheus's or Pythagoras's opinions, and refused to eat an egg (as some do the heart and brain) imagining it to be the principle of generation.

And Alexander the Epicurean ridiculingly repeated, To feed on beans and parents' heads Is equal sin; As if the Pythagoreans meant eggs by the word [Greek omitted] (BEANS), deriving it from [Greek omitted]( TO CONCEIVE), and thought it as unlawful to feed on eggs as on the animals that lay them.

Now to pretend a dream for the cause of my abstaining, to an Epicurean, had been a defence more irrational than the cause itself; and therefore I suffered jocose Alexander to enjoy his opinion, for he was a pleasant man and an excellent scholar.
Soon after he proposed that perplexed question, that plague of the inquisitive, Which was first, the bird or the egg?
And my friend Sylla, saying that with this little question, as with an engine, we shook the great and weighty problem (whether the world had a beginning), declared his dislike of such questions.

But Alexander deriding the question as slight and impertinent, my relation Firmus said:.