164 COSMOS. 



already, before the campaign, composed a work on Botany 

 and a treatise on the or^rans of vision. Owingf to the riodd 

 austerity of his morals, and the unchecked freedom of hit 

 speech, he was regarded with hatred by Alexander himself 

 who had already fallen from his noble and elevated mode ol 

 thought, and by the flatterers of the prince. Callisthenei 

 inidauntedly preferred liberty to life ; and when, in Bactria 

 he was implicated, although guiltless, in the conspiracy cK 

 Hermolaus and the pages, he became the unhappy occasioi 

 of Alexander's exasperation against his former instructor 

 Theophrastes, the warm friend and fellow-disciple of Callis 

 thenes, had the generosity to undertake his defense after his 

 fall. Of Aristotle we only know that he recommended pru- 

 dence to his friend before his departure ; for being, as it would 

 appear, familiar with a court life from his long sojourn with 

 Philip of Macedon, he counseled him to " converse as little 

 as possible with the king, and, where necessity required that 

 he should do so, always to coincide with the views of the sov- 

 ereign. ^ 



Aided by the co-operation of chosen men of the school of 

 the Stagirite, Callisthenes, who was already conversant with 

 nature before he left Greece, gave a higher direction to the 

 investigations of his companions in the extended sphere of ob- 

 servation now first opened to them. The richness of vegeta- 

 tion and the diversity of animal forms, the configuration of the 

 soil and the periodical rising of great rivers, no longer sufficed 

 to engage exclusive attention, for the time v/as come when man 

 and the different races of mankind, in their manifold gradations 

 of color and of civilization, could not fail to be regarded, ac- 

 cording to Aristotle's own expression,! " as the central point 

 and the object of all creation, and as the beings in whom the 

 divine nature of thought was first made manifest." From the 

 little that remains to us of the narratives of Onesicritus, who 

 was so much censured in antiquity, we find that the Mace- 

 donians were astonished, on penetrating far to the East, to 

 meet with no African, curly-haired negroes, although they 

 found the Indian races spoken of by Herodotus as " dark col- 

 ored, and resembling Ethiopians. "$ The influence of the at- 

 mosphere on color, and the different effect produced by dry and 

 moist winds, were carefully noticed. In the early Homeric 



• Valer. Maxim., vii,, 2: " ut cum roge aut rarissime a '^ia,m ^u 

 cundissime loqueretur." 



t Aristot., Polif., i., 8, and Etk. ad Eudemum, vii., 14. 

 t Strabo, lib. xv., p. 690 and 695. Herod., iii., 101. 



