54 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



career was in fact an official career after the typically Roman model. He 

 received a thorough education from good private teachers in Rome and after- 

 wards served alternately in the army and the civil administration. He spent 

 a long time in Germany, where he held a military command, and eventually 

 became commander-in-chief of a division of the fleet. On the first occasion 

 known to history when Vesuvius was in eruption (a.d. 79), he lay with his 

 vessels near Naples. In order to study the unusual phenomenon closer he 

 ordered a boat to row him to the foot of the volcano, and there he perished. 

 Both in his treatises and in his biographies he stands out as a man of the 

 highest probity of the good old Roman type, brave, honest, and loyal. Con- 

 stantly engaged in a round of official functions, he devoted every unoccupied 

 moment, both at Rome and in the distant provinces, to study and author- 

 ship. His capacity for work is described as inexhaustible, and the writings 

 he left bear witness to his remarkable erudition. He worked at the most 

 widely different subjects: military science and military history, rhetoric, and 

 linguistics. The only treatise of his which has come down to posterity is his 

 great work of thirty-seven books, the Nattiral History^ on which his fame 

 really rests. It represents a veritable encyclopaedia covering the entire knowl- 

 edge of nature at that time, including its application to medicine, technology, 

 and economy. It begins with an account of the universe and its laws and goes 

 on to give an increasingly specialized description of various natural objects. 

 Books VIII to XI deal with animals, and a number of scattered notes on 

 zoological subjects are also to be found in other sections of the great 

 work. 



In his general conception Pliny was a Stoic. The Stoic philosophy was 

 founded in Athens at the same time as the Epicurean, but its founders and 

 earliest leaders all came from Semitic countries, and several historians have 

 made an attempt to trace an oriental influence in its ascetic contempt for 

 material life-values and its strong feeling for personal responsibility. How- 

 ever, Stoicism found its way to Rome, whose noblest men were attracted by 

 its austere sense of duty and, as was the Roman habit, converted its system 

 to practical uses. Stoicism laid greater stress than Epicureanism on a practi- 

 cal way of living; it was not so much concerned with the general conception 

 of nature and its laws. Even Pliny's general ideas of nature constitute a not 

 very interesting record of the dicta of earlier authors; here, for instance, we 

 find the Aristotelean theory of a spherical universe, with the four elements as 

 its essential components, with — on the Pythagorean, or rather Heracleitean, 

 pattern — fire as the primary cause, the origin of the soul; a divinity governs 

 the world, but it is folly to seek to discover its entity, though a greater folly 

 still is polytheism. Oracular utterances and prodigies, on the other hand, 

 are recounted by the score and without any expression of doubt of their 

 value. 



