MEMOIR OP ARISTOTLE, 99 



phanes, and Zeno the Eleatic, which shews the vast 

 research and sagacity of his observations. He has 

 separately discussed the nature of colours, and of 

 the objects of hearing. He has also explained the 

 causes of meteors, comets or bearded stars (wyu- 

 mat), earthquakes, exhalations, clouds, rain, snow, 

 the galaxy, the rainbow, and other phenomena of the 

 atmosphere, in a work on Meteorology, His books 

 on plants and minerals have perished ; but we learn 

 from himself that he had given an account of all the 

 different fossils and metals. He is also said to have 

 written on Comparative Anatomy, but that work no 

 longer remains.* 



It is chiefly in his character as the historian and 

 ' interpreter of Nature that Aristotle ought to be con- 

 templated in a work like the present. His know- 

 ledge in this department was as varied and compre- 

 hensive as in political and speculative science ; his 

 object being to accumulate and digest all that was 

 then known of the structure and productions of the 

 earth ; and if we may judge of what is lost by what 

 has come down to us entire, it would be no easy 

 matter to determine whether most admiration wa 



* The treatise on Plants, edited with his works, is ac- 

 knowledged to be by Theophrastus, whose writings, from 

 the circumstances connected with their preservation, might 

 naturally be confounded with those of his master. The 

 treatise De Mundo, as also the collections of wonderful 

 Narratives, and perhaps the Fragment on the Winds, are 

 reckoned spurious, and have been rejected from the number 

 of his works, the internal evidence being against their ur 

 puted authorship. 



