6 HEROES OF SCIENCE. 



Certain it is that the boy loved study, and it Soon 

 became evident that his loss was compensated, as 

 it is very often in such cases, by a spirit of self- 

 reliance. In his eighteenth year he went to Athens 

 to study the healing art. When Aristoteles was 

 about twenty-one years of age, the philosopher 

 Plato returned from Sicily, and the young man 

 then seems to have cared more for the study of the 

 sciences which were requisite for a polished phy- 

 sician, than for the art of healing. He made his 

 first self-sacrifice, as many a man has done since ; 

 he gave up the uncertainties of the art of curing 

 diseases, and learned natural history and philosophy. 

 His eagerness for knowledge and his extraordinary 

 acuteness and sagacity doubtless attracted Plato's 

 notice, who soon called him " the intellect of the 

 school," and said his house was " the house of the 

 reader." As Aristoteles grew up, his early train- 

 ing and his love of the truth seen in nature, began 

 to separate him from the common run of men, and 

 his self-reliance began to make him an antagonist 

 to the teachings even of the great Plato. But this 

 opposition was not that of a vain and conceited 

 young man. Plato had noticed his ability, and he 

 was really a man of mark, whose opinions were 

 valuable. Aristoteles studied facts, and knew many 

 truths about natural history, but his wonderful 

 master cared more for ideas. Such men must 

 always clash, and Aristoteles writes in one of his 

 books about his opposition to the philosophy of 

 Plato, that it is painful to refute the doctrine of 



