22 Greek Biology 



of animals. His actual observations are contained in this latter 

 work which is in many ways his finest scientific production 

 in the great collection on the History of animals, and in the 

 remarkable treatise On parts of animals. Certain of his deduc- 

 tions concerning the nature and mechanism of life can be 

 found in his two works which deal with the movements of 

 animals (one of which is very doubtfully genuine) and in his 

 tracts On respiration, On sleep, &c. The treatise On plants 

 and the Problems in their present form are late and spurious, 

 but they are based on works of members of his school. They 

 were, however, perhaps originally prepared at the other end 

 of the Greek world in Magna Graecia. 



Aristotle was a most voluminous author and his biological 

 writings form but a small fraction of those to which his name 

 is attached. Yet these biological works contain a prodigious 

 number of first-hand observations and it has always been 

 difficult to understand how one investigator could collect all 

 these facts, however rapid his work and skilful his methods. 

 The explanations that have reached us from antiquity are, 

 indeed, picturesque, but they are neither credible in themselves 

 nor are they consistent with each other. Thus Pliny writing 

 about A. D. 77 says ' Alexander the Great, fired by desire to 

 learn of the natures of animals, entrusted the prosecution of 

 this design to Aristotle. . . . For this end he placed at his 

 disposal some thousands of men in every part of Asia and Greece, 

 and among them hunters, fowlers, fishers, park-keepers, herds- 

 men, bee-wards, as well as keepers of fish-ponds and aviaries in 

 order that no creature might escape his notice. Through the 

 information thus collected he was able to compose some fifty 

 volumes.' 1 Athenaeus, who lived in the early part of the third 

 century A. D., assures us that ' Aristotle the Stagirite received 

 eight hundred talents [i.e. equal to about ^200,000 of our 

 money] from Alexander as his contribution towards perfecting 



1 Pliny, Naturalis historia, viii. 17. 



