56 Baron Cuvier's Lectures on the Natural Sciences. 



vanced age. He died at the age of eighty-one, in the 348th 

 year before Christ. 



Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, was his successor in philoso- 

 phy. Before undertaking the history of the labours of this 

 great man, which form so remarkable an epoch in science, it is 

 necessary to advert to those of some of his predecessors, of which 

 we have not yet had occasion to speak. Some of them belong 

 to no sect of philosophy in particular ; others are of the school 

 of the Asclepiades, who, as we have said, cultivated the sciences 

 only with a practical object. Among the first, we must in par- 

 ticular notice Herodotus and Xenophon. 



Herodotus, the oldest prose writer whose works have come 

 down to us, was born at Halycarnassus in Caria, about the year 

 484. He was a great traveller, having visited successively a 

 part of the East, Egypt and Greece, and it is in his writings 

 that we find the first positive facts in natural history. He has 

 given a tolerable description of the crocodile of Egypt, and of 

 several other animals of the same country. He also speaks of 

 the hippopotamus, but what he says of it is less correct. Aristotle 

 took advantage of these descriptions, • and even copied some of 

 them almost verbatim. 



Xenophon engaged more particularly ^in natural history. He 

 was born in 445, that is to say fifteen years later than Socrates, 

 whose pupil he was, and whose apology he published. He de- 

 voted only a part of his time to the study of philosophy. He 

 was a soldier and a statesman. He was present in that famous 

 expedition of the Ten Thousand Greeks, which the young Cyrus 

 had called to his aid, and, after the death of. the principal offi- 

 cers, it was he who commanded the little band in its retreat to- 

 wards Greece. Besides the account which he has left us of this 

 expedition, we have various moral and historical works of his ; 

 but the most interesting in reference to science is his Treatise 

 on Hunting (the Cynegetics), which he composed with the view 

 of inspiring the Grecian youth with a taste for that exercise, 

 as calculated to forri them, during peace, to the labours of war. 



Xenophon, in this treatise, gives us accounts respecting cer- 

 tain animals, which we in vain search for elsewhere. He treats 

 of the different races of dogs which were employed in hunting, 

 and of the two species of hares which occurred in the Pelopon- 



