INFLUENCE OF THE ROMAN KMflKK. 19i> 



circus, should have failed to advance the knowledge of com- 

 parative anatomy.* I have already noticed the merit of 

 Dioscorides in regard to the collection and study of plants, 

 and it only remains, therefore, to observe that his works exer- 

 cised the greatest influence on the botany and pharmaceutical 

 chemistry of the Arabs. The botanical garden of the Ro- 

 man physician Antonius Castor, who lived to be upward of a 

 hundred years of age, was perhaps laid out in imitation of the 

 botanical gardens of Theophrastes and Mithridates, but it did 

 not, in all probability, lead to any further advancement in 

 science than did the collection of fossil bones formed by the 

 Emperor Augustus, or the museum of objects and products of 

 nature which has been ascribed on very slight foundation to 

 Apuleius of Madaura.t 



The representation of the contributions made by the epoch 

 of the Roman dominion to cosmical knowledge would be in- 

 complete were I to omit mentioning the great attempt made 

 by Caius Plinius Secundus to comprise a description of the 

 universe in a work consisting of thirty-seven books. In the 

 whole of antiquity, nothing similar had been attempted ; and 

 although the work grew, from the nature of the undertaking, 

 into a species of encyclopaedia of nature and art (the author 

 himself, in his dedication to Titus, not scrupling to apply to 

 his work the then more noble Greek expression eyKVK^orrai- 

 6eia, or conception and popular sphere of universal knowledge), 

 yet it must be admitted that, notwithstanding the deficiency of 

 an internal connection, among the different parts of which the 

 whole is composed, it presents the plan of a physical descrip- 

 tion of the universe. 



The Historia Naturalis of Pliny, entitled, in the tabular 

 view which forms what is known as the first book, Historia 

 Mundi, and in a letter of his nephew to his friend Macer still 

 more aptly, Natures Historia, embraces both the heavens and 

 the earth, the position and course of the heavenly bodies, the 

 meteorological processes of the atmosphere, the form of the 



* The Numidian Metellus caused 142 elephants to be killed in the 

 circus. In the games which Pompey gave, 600 lions and 406 panthers 

 were assembled. Augustus sacrificed 3500 wild beasts in the national 

 festivities, and a tender husband laments that he could not celebrate 

 the day of his wife's death by a sanguinary gladiatorial fight at Verona, 

 " because contrary winds had detained in port the panthers which had 

 been bought in Africa!" (Plin., Epist., vi., 34.) 



t See ante, p. 190. Yet Apuleius, as Cuvier remarks (Hist, des Scien- 

 ces Naturelles, t. i., p. 287), was the first to describe accurately the bony 

 hook in the second and third stomach of the Aplysiae. 



