198 COSMOS. 



the grand unity of nature is adduced as productive of encour- 

 agement and consolation to man. 



The conclusion of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny — the 

 greatest Roman memorial transmitted to the literature of the 

 Middle Ages — is composed in a true spirit of cosmical descrip- 

 tion. It contains, in the condition in which we have possessed 

 it since 1831,* a brief consideration of the comparative natu- 

 ral history of countries in different zones, a eulogium of South- 

 ern Europe between the Mediterranean and the chain of the 

 Alps, and a description in praise of the Hesperian sky, " where 

 the temperate and gentle mildness of the climate had," accord- 

 ing to a dogma of the older Pythagoreans, " early hastened 

 the liberation of mankind from barbarism." 



The influence of the Roman dominion as a constant element 

 of union and fusion required the more urgently and forcibly to 

 be brought forward in a history of the contemplation of the 

 universe, since we are able to recognize the traces of this in 

 fluence in its remotest consequences even at a period when 

 the bond of political union had become less compact, and was 

 even partially destroyed by the inroads of barbarians. Clau- 

 dian, who stands forth in the decline of literature during the 

 latter and more disturbed age of Theodosius the Great and 

 his sons, distinguished for the endowment of a revived poetic 

 productiveness, still sings, in too highly laudatory strains, of 

 the dominion of the Romans.! 



Hcec est, in gremium victos qnce sola recepit, 

 Humannmque genus communi nomine fovit, 

 Matris, non domince, ritu ; civesque vocavit 

 Q,uos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit. 

 Hujus pacijicis debemus moribus omnes 

 Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes. ... 



External means of constraint, artificially-arranged civil m- 

 stitutions, and long-continued servitude, might certainly tend 

 to unite nations by destroying the individual existence of each 

 one ; but the feeling of the unity and common condition of 

 the whole human race, and of the equal rights of all men, has 

 a nobler origin, and is based on the internal promptings of the 



ulam consideratio contemplatioque naturae. Erigimur, elatiores fieri 

 videmur, humana despicimus, cogitantesque supera atque ccslestia hsec 

 nostra, ut exigua et minima, contemnimus." (Cic, Acad., ii., 41.) 



* Plin., xxxvii., 13 (ed. Sillig., t. v., 1836, p. 320). All earlier edi- 

 tions closed with the words " Hispaniam qnacunque ambitur nyri.'' 

 The conclusion of tlie work was discovered in 1831, in a Bamberg ^ w 

 dex, by Herr Ludwig v. Jan, professor at Schweinfurt. 



t Claudian, in Secundum Consulatum Stillichonis, v. 150-155. 



