14 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



possible) assured of this, when we speculate upon the 

 influence of his biology on his philosophy. 1 



Aristotle -is no tyro in biology. When he writes upon 

 Mechanics or on Physics we read him with difficulty : 

 his ways are not our ways ; his explanations seem 

 laboured ; his science has an archaic look, as it were 

 coming from another world to ours, a world before 

 Galileo. Speaking with all diffidence, I have my doubts 

 as to his mathematics. In spite of a certain formidable 

 passage in the Ethics, where we have a sort of ethica more 

 geometrico demonstrata, in spite of his favourite use of the 

 equality of the angles of a triangle to two right angles as an 

 example of proof indisputable, in spite even of his treatise 

 De Lineis Insecabilibus, I am tempted to suspect that he 

 sometimes passed shyly beneath the superscription over 

 Plato's door. 



But he was, and is, a very great naturalist. When he 

 treats of Natural History, his language is our language, 

 and his methods and his problems are wellnigh identical 

 with our own. He had familiar knowledge of a thousand 

 varied forms of life, of bird and beast, and plant and 

 creeping thing. He was careful to note their least details 

 of outward structure, and curious to probe by dissection 

 into their parts within. He studied the metamorphoses 

 of gnat and butterfly, and opened the bird's egg to find 

 the mystery of incipient life in the embryo chick. He 



1 Pursuing my geographical inquiries a very little further, I have 

 discovered that of the very large number of place-names mentioned 

 in the Problems, by far the greater number are situated in Southern 

 Italy, that is to say in Magna Graecia, or in Sicily ; and I live in 

 hopes of seeing this work, or a very large portion of it, expunged, for 

 this and other weightier reasons, from the canonical writings of 

 Aristotle. In the treatise De Plantts, which is already acknowledged 

 to be spurious, only three or four geographical names, I think, occur ; 

 but they likewise are every one of them situated within the bounds of 

 Magna Graecia. 



