158 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



Books III to VI, Geography; Book VII, Anthropology; Books VIII 

 to XI, Zoology; Books XII to XXVII, Botany, in the main agricultu- 

 ral, horticultural, and medical; XXVIII to XXXII, Zoology again, 

 but in relation to medicine; as also in connection with aquatic 

 animals some paragraphs on the remedial efficacy of certain 

 waters; Books XXXIII to XXXVII, Mineralogy, more especially 

 as applied to medicine, painting, plastic art. Book I of the work 

 is prefatory and introductory to the work as a whole. 



At first thought it may seem extraordinary that so vast a work, 

 filling so many volumes, should have escaped the fate of many 

 hundreds of less voluminous things, and should have reached 

 modern times in its completeness. The probable explanation has 

 been suggested by the historian Meyer, who thinks that its very 

 voluminousness was its safeguard. The copying of the complete 

 Natural History by hand w r as a large enterprise, and the manuscript 

 when done was very costly. Men take care of that which is worth 

 much money. 1 In the middle of the nineteenth century, an excellent 

 authority reported the existence of more than sixty manuscripts of 

 Pliny of greater or less antiquity. 2 Since the invention of printing 

 more than eighty different editions have been printed of which 

 number as many as eighteen appeared in the fifteenth century, 

 and more than forty in the sixteenth. 



The high prestige held by Pliny throughout mediaeval times 

 was due to the fact of his having written in Latin. All the other 

 authors of greatest importance as to natural history had written 

 in Greek; and Latin was the language of the middle ages. The 

 work was also extensively, if not mainly, a compilation, and was 

 made up in large part of translations into Latin from the greater 

 Greeks, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Nicander, and Dioscorides, and 

 so had much the character of a compend of all natural history. 



As a Roman among Romans, Pliny was of the utilitarian bent 

 of mind; even a subscriber to the dogma, then antiquated, that all 

 things that are upon earth are here for the sake of man; not that 

 he so holds it as piously to praise nature for universal benignity 

 or generosity; for in one of his earlier volumes he says: "If 

 nature appears to have produced everything for the sake of man, 

 still man is often obliged to pay rather dearly for her gifts ; so that 

 it is not so easy to decide whether she has more the character 

 of a benign mother than of an unkind stepmother." 



' Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, vol. ii, p. 125. 

 L * Julius Sillig, quoted by Meyer, Ibid. 

 \Pliny, Hist. Nat., Book vii, ch. i. 



