20 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



only lately reinvestigated, of habits only of late made 

 known. 1 And many such anticipations of our knowledge, 

 and many allusions to things of which we are perhaps still 

 ignorant, may yet be brought to light ; for we are still 

 far from having interpreted and elucidated the whole 

 mass of Aristotle's recorded erudition : which whole 

 recorded mass is only, after all, tanquam tabula nau- 

 fragii. 



There is perhaps no chapter in the Historia Animalium 

 more attractive to the anatomist than one which deals 

 with the anatomy and mode of reproduction of the cartila- 

 ginous fishes, the sharks and rays, a chapter which moved 

 to admiration that prince of anatomists Johannes Miiller. 2 

 The latter wrote a volume on the text of a page of 

 Aristotle, a page packed full of a multitude of facts, in 

 no one of which did Johannes Miiller discover a flaw. 

 The subject is technical, but the gist of the matter is this : 

 that among these Selachians (as, after Aristotle, we still 

 sometimes call them) there are many diversities in the 

 structure of the parts in question, and several distinct 

 modes in which the young are brought forth or matured. 

 For in many kinds an egg is laid, which eggs, by the way, 

 Aristotle describes with great minuteness. Other kinds 

 do not lay eggs, but bring forth their young alive, and 

 these include the Torpedo and numerous sharks or dogfish. 

 The eggshell is in these cases very thin, and breaks 

 before the birth of the young. But among them there 

 are a couple of sharks, of which one species was within 



1 e.g. the reproduction of the pipe-fishes (Syngnathi), the hermaphro- 

 dite nature of the Serrani, the nest-building of the Wrasses, &c., &c. 



2 Cf. Cavolini, in his classical Mem. sulla Generazione dei Pesci, 

 Naples, 1787 : ' E quando io . . . scorro la Storia degli Animali di 

 Aristotile, non posso non essere da stupore preso, in esse leggendo 

 veduti quei fatti, che a noi non si son potuti che a stento manifestare : 

 e rilevati poi con tutta la nettezza, e posti in parallelo coi fatti gia 

 riconosciuti nel feto del gallo ; ' &c. 



