526 COSMOS. 



The great work on animals appears to have been written 

 only a short time after the Meteorologica, the date of which 

 would seem, from internal evidence,* to fall in the 106th, 

 or, at the latest, in the lllth Olympiad, and, therefore, either 

 fourteen years before Aristotle came to the court of Philip, 

 or, at the furthest, three years before the passage across the 

 Granicus. It must, however, be admitted, that some few 

 facts may be advanced as evidence against this assumption 

 of an early completion of the nine books of Aristotle's history 

 of animals. Among these must be reckoned the accurate 

 knowledge possessed by Aristotle of the elephant, the bearded 

 horse-stag (hippelaphus), the Bactrian two-humped camel, the 

 hippardion, supposed to be the hunting-tiger (guepard), and 

 the Indian buffalo, which does not appear to have been intro- 

 duced into Europe before the time of the Crusades. But here 

 it must be remarked, that the native place of this large and 

 singular stag, having a horse's mane, which Diard and Duvan- 

 cel sent from Eastern India to Cuvier, who gave to it the 

 name of Cervus aristotelis, is, according to Aristotle's own 

 account, not the Indian Pentapotamia traversed by Alexander, 

 but Arachosia, west of Candahar, which, together with Gedro- 



the belief of the philosopher having accompanied Alexander to Egypt, 

 " whence," he says, "the Stagirite must have brought back to Athens 

 (Olymp. 112, 2) all the materials for the Historia Animalium." Subse- 

 quently (1830) the distinguished French naturalist abandoned this 

 opinion ; because after a more careful examination he remarked, " that 

 the descriptions of Egyptian animals were not sketched from life, but 

 from notices by Herodotus." (See also Cuvier, Histoire des sciences 

 naturelles, publiee par Magdeleine de Saint Agy, t. i. 1841, p. 136.) 



* To these internal indications belong the statement of the perfect insu- 

 lation of the Caspian Sea; the notice of the great comet, which appeared 

 under Nicomachus when holding the office of Archon, Olymp. 109, 4 

 (according to Corsini), and which is not to be confounded with that which 

 von Boguslawski has lately named the comet of Aristotle (under the 

 Archon Asteus, Olymp. 101, 4; Aristot., Meteor., lib. i. cap. 6, 10; vol. 

 i. p. 395, Ideler; and which is probably identical with the comets of 

 1695 and 1843 1 ?); and lastly the mention of the destruction of the tem- 

 ple at Ephesus, as well as of a lunar rainbow, seen on two occasions in 

 the course of fifty years. (Compare Schneider ad Aristot. Hist, de Ani- 

 malibus, vol. i. pp. xl. xlii. ciii. and cxx.; Ideler ad Aristot. Meteor., vol. 

 i. p. x. ; and Humboldt, Asie cent., t. ii. p. 168.) We know that the 

 Historia Animalium "was written later than the Meteorologica," from 

 the fact that allusion is made in the last-named work to the former as 

 to a work about to follow (Meteor., i. 1. 3, and iv. 12, 13^ 



