158 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION 



remarkable large stag with the horse's mane, which Diard 

 and Duvaucel sent from Eastern India to Cuvier, (and to 

 which Cuvier gave the name of Cervus aristotelis) is, accord- 

 ing to the Stagirite's own notice, not the Indian Penta- 

 potamia traversed by Alexander, but Arachosia, a country 

 west of Candahar, which together with Gedrosia formed an 

 ancient Persian Satrapy ( 237 ). May not the notices, mostly 

 so brief, on the forms and habits of the above named ani- 

 mals, have been derived by Aristotle from information ob- 

 tained by him, quite independently of the Macedonian 

 expeditions, from Persia and from Babylon, the centre of 

 such widely extended trading intercourse ? It should be 

 remembered that when preparations by means of alcohol ( 338 ) 

 were wholly unknown, it was only skins and bones, and not 

 the soft parts susceptible of dissection, which under any 

 circumstances could be sent from remote parts of Asia to 

 Greece. Probable as it is that Aristotle received both from 

 Philip and Alexander the most liberal support in the prose- 

 cution of his studies in physics and in natural history, in 

 procuring immense zoological materials from the whole of 

 Greece and from the Grecian seas, and even in laying the 

 grounds of a collection of books unique for the period, and 

 which passed afterwards to Theophrastus and subse- 

 quently to Neleus of Scepsis, yet we must regard the 

 stories of presents of eight hundred talents, and the ( ' main- 

 tenance of many thousands of collectors, overseers of fish- 

 ponds, and bird-keepers" as exaggerations of a later period ( 339 ), 

 or as traditions misunderstood by Pliny, Athenaeus, and Julian. 

 The Macedonian expedition, which opened so large and 

 fair a portion of the earth's surface to a single nation of 

 such high intellect and cultivation, may therefore be regarded 



