MEMOIR OF PLINY. 43 



must have been totally and irretrievably lost to the 

 world. 



Nearly 400 years before Pliny wrote, Aristotle 

 had collected and embodied into a systematic form, 

 whatever information in science (for we speak here 

 of that alone) the ancient world possessed ; but he 

 did more, he greatly extended the boundaries of na- 

 tural knowledge, by superadding to the labours of 

 his predecessors many facts and observations of his 

 own, from which he elicited general principles that 

 served as the first foundation of that splendid super- 

 structure, which, after a long interval, rose to such 

 beauty and symmetry in its several compartments 

 under the hands of Newton and Laplace, Linnaeus 

 and Jussieu, Buffon and Cuvier. The works of the 

 Greek philosopher were early imported into Italy ; 

 but the Roman government, both under the Repub- 

 lic and the Emperors, was too much occupied in ex- 

 tending and securing its conquests, to patronise or 

 encourage physical studies. That the mere love of 

 nature had attracted many to these delightful pur- 

 suits, in the time that elapsed between Aristotle and 

 Pliny, is well known from the excerpts which they 

 furnished to others ; but their works have perished 

 in the wreck of ages ; and the two great pillars of 

 science already named, which mark the respective 

 eras of Vespasian and Alexander the Great, stand 

 forth in the wide field of antiquity like Baalbec 

 and Tadmor in the desert in solitary grandeur; but, 

 like these venerable ruins, too, dismantled and mu- 

 tilated of their original proportions. 



