1(32 Epitome of the Progress of JVatural Science. 



Such schools, and such men, which entered upon the discus- 

 sion of every branch of knowledge, could not fail to plant its 

 seeds deep in some powerful mind, and to the great benefit of 

 mankind, if such a mind was free to exert itself, untrammelled 

 by the superstition and jealousy which had cramped the intellec- 

 tual labours of Socrates and Plato. 



Accordingly, after the death of this last philosopher, in the 

 348th year B. C, in the eighty-first year of his age, Aristotle the 

 Stagyrite, his disciple and successor, appeared upon the scene — 

 an individual, if we are to value men for the variety of their 

 attainments, and their disinterested devotion to the improvement 

 of their fellow creatures, who may claim to receive the highest 

 meed of praise so great a benefactor can receive at our hands. 

 He was fortunate in the period in which he lived, having been 

 brought up at the Macedonian court, a cotemporary with Philip, 

 who subsequently appointed him tutor to his son, Alexander the 

 Great. It was his good fortune to inspire his royal pupil with a 

 love for natural science. It appears that he caused to be trans- 

 mitted to Aristotle the most remarkable productions of the coun- 

 tries he subdued ; so that although the conquests of Alexander 

 were not, in their effects, permanent victories for his family, yet 

 each of them was a real enlargement of the empire of know- 

 ledge. Pliny states that more than a thousand persons were placed 

 at the disposition of the philosopher, to assist him in collecting 

 the materials of his history of animals, beside an almost imlimit- 

 ed command of money. At his school, the lyceum, he attended 

 in the mornings with his disciples, to examine his specimens, and 

 in the afternoon he expounded the higher branches of his philo- 

 sophy. Diogenes Laertius has preserved the title of two hundred 

 and sixty works of this extraordinary man, most of which are 

 lost. They a[)pear to have embraced almost the whole range 

 of human knowledge. Logic, rhetoric, poetry, morals, politics, 

 metaphysics, general physics, meteorology, mineralogy, and the 

 history of animals. On all these subjects, he lays down no rules, 

 but those deduced from observed facts. It may he truly said of 

 him, that he gave to all the sciences the right method of ad- 

 vancement ; and that in the natural sciences especially, he col- 

 lected more facts, and deduced more general laws, than all his 

 successors have done, up to the period of that great naturalist of 

 our own limes, Cuvier. Many of his principles in general physics, 



