1 00 MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 



to his descriptions of the terraqueous globe, 

 with its seas, rivers, mountains, and volcanoes ; or to 

 his minute diligence in investigating the several ob- 

 jects of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. 



Fortunate it is for Natural Science, that both his 

 History of Animals, and his philosophy respecting 

 that history, have reached us in a far more perfect 

 state than any other portion of his physiological 

 writings. On the subject of Zoology, his treatises 

 were comprised in fifty books, of which twenty-five 

 are happily preserved. It is quite immaterial to our 

 purpose, to inquire whether this immense body of 

 Natural knowledge is to be considered as containing 

 the result of his own observations only, or whether 

 it is a collection of all that had been observed by 

 others. The latter is most probably the case ; so 

 vast an undertaking being evidently too much for 

 any one man to accomplish . It may seem extraor- 

 dinary, that, in an early age, without the inventions 

 and improvements of modern philosophy, and on a 

 branch of science which is naturally progressive, so 

 vast a mass of information should have been col- 

 lected and arranged by a solitary individual, how- 

 ever long his life, and however great his leisure. 

 But Aristotle was the friend of a man as extraor- 

 dinary as himself, who generously supplied him with 

 the means of at once gratifying his taste for univer- 

 sal learning, and conferring an invaluable benefit on 

 posterity. The conquests of Alexander, and his 



marches through so many distant and different coun- 



