APPENDIX. 295 



ander, when he was thirteen years of age, in the second 

 year of the 109th Olympiad, when Phythodotus was Archon 

 of Athens. Aristotle returned to Athens in the second year 

 of the lllth Olympiad, in the Archonship of Evaenetus. 

 He taught at Athens for thirteen years, from whence he 

 fled to Chalcis, and there he died, in the third year of the 

 114th Olympiad, during the Archonship of Philocles. 



There is, indeed, a passage in Pliny, (book x. ch. 64, sect. 

 84, on the fecundity of mice,) where he says, that among 

 other things Aristotle has spoken in his History of Animals 

 (vi. 29) of the gravid foetus of the Persian mice ; but the 

 Greek exemplar contains no authority from which Pliny 

 could have derived the words which he has added : &quot; More 

 wonderful than all is the foetus of the mice, which we cannot 

 unhesitatingly receive, though derived from the authority of 

 Aristotle, and the soldiers of Alexander the Great.&quot; In 

 this and in two other places he calls those soldiers whom 

 others are in the habit of calling the companions of Alexander 

 the Great. But there is also a passage in the Meteorics of 

 Aristotle (iii. 1), where he mentions as a recent event the 

 destruction of the temple of Ephesus, by the incendiary 

 Herostratus, on the day of Alexander s birth, in these words : 

 &quot;As it has just now happened in the burning of the temple 

 of Ephesus.&quot; This book, therefore, appears to have been 

 written at the commencement of the 106th Olympiad, and 

 with it the History of Animals is very closely connected, as 

 I have shown in my treatise on the order of the books of 

 Physics ; so that we may suppose that they were written in 

 nearly the same Olympiad, if we regard only the series of the 

 works; and no interruption occurred with which we are 

 unacquainted. On the other hand, in the Meteorics (iii. 5), 

 he speaks of a lunar rainbow, and says that it is rarely seen, 

 and then adds, &quot;that it has occurred but twice in more than 

 fifty years.&quot; If we reckon these fifty years from the birth 

 of Aristotle, in the first year of the 99th Olympiad, that 

 book will fall in the third or fourth year of the lllth Olym 

 piad ; and from this calculation it would follow that this 

 book was also written in Athens, but that the first date is 

 to be taken in a wider sense. 



From all this, we may easily perceive that at this day we 

 are entirely ignorant of the sources of information collected 



