56 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



particulars of cattle-management at that period are quite sound. Among 

 land-animals he includes even the cold-blooded vertebrates; after that he 

 deals with birds, fishes (including molluscs), and insects. Details of all kinds 

 of animals belonging to these groups are in the main similar to those men- 

 tioned above. Insects in particular seem to have attracted his attention; he 

 never wearies of expressing his admiration for their perfect organisms, in 

 spite of their small bodily size, and he gives an account of what was known 

 of their organic systems. The bee he describes in great detail and he relates 

 its habits, in many respects correctly, although he did not succeed, any 

 more than the other ancient authors, in gaining any idea of its method of 

 reproduction. 



Pliny' s anatomical ideas 

 After Pliny has thus given an account of the animals known to him, he dis- 

 cusses the various organs of the human and animal body on the same plan; 

 each organ is considered in reference to its qualities and occurrence in the 

 various animals. Here we clearly find Aristotle to be the pattern and main 

 source of information; but while the latter' s description of the organs is given 

 with a view to tracing the connexion and origin of the forms, Pliny's ac- 

 count still has the character of a work of reference, in which all the memo- 

 randa that he was able to collect out of his vast erudition are cited with no 

 kind of theoretical purpose and without any deeper significance than the 

 word that clothes them; for instance, the horn of the ox, of the horned snake, 

 and of the snail are treated as all one. A wealth of valuable notes from the 

 rich scientific store of the anatomical knowledge of antiquity has thus been 

 preserved for posterity by Pliny, whose sources of information have been 

 lost to us, but besides this he conscientiously notes down a number of ancient 

 prodigies, which of course inspired fear in his time and have consequently 

 been handed down to history — of sacrificial animals which had no liver, 

 or of the Messenian champion of liberty, Aristomenes, whose heart the Spar- 

 tans found to be covered with hair — without in any way hinting at the 

 possibility of fraud on the part of the sacrificial priests. A mass of information 

 regarding the medicinal use of animals or animal parts closes the zoological 

 section of his Natural History. 



Pliny himself states that he had recourse to two thousand books by 

 various authors for the compiling of his work, which maintains also from 

 beginning to end its character of a confused motley of notes. This many-sided 

 learning, which has very much impressed past generations, seems in our day, 

 when only first-hand knowledge is really respected, rather pitiful. Never- 

 theless, as previously pointed out, Pliny has certainly been underestimated. 

 For fifteen hundred years his work was the main source of man's knowledge 

 of natural history, and when during the Renaissance a Gesner or an Aldro- 

 vandi revived the pursuit of zoological research, they at once began where 



