OF THE UNIVERSE. UOMAN EMPIRE. 195 



Augustus, or the assemblage of objects of natural history 

 which has been ascribed on very feeble grounds to Appuleius 

 of Madaura. ( 308 ) 



Before we close the description oJ what the period of 

 the Roman empire contributed towards the advancement 

 of cosmical knowledge, we have still to mention the grand 

 essay towards a description of the Universe which Caius 

 Plinius Secundus endeavoured to comprise in thirty-seven 

 books. In the whole of antiquity nothing similar had been 

 attempted; and although in the execution of the work 

 it became a kind of encyclopaedia of nature and art 

 (the author in his dedication to Titus not scrupling to 

 apply to his work the then more noble Greek expression 

 eyicvc\o7rai3a), yet it cannot be denied that, notwithstanding 

 the want of an internal connection and coherence of parts, 

 still the whole presents a plan or sketch of a physical 

 description of the Universe. 



The Historia Naturalis of Pliny, termed Historia Mundi 

 in the tabular view which forms what is now called the first 

 book, and in a letter of his nephew's to his friend Macer 

 more finely described as a Naturae Historia, embraces the 

 heavens and the earth, the position and course of the 

 heavenly bodies, the meteorological processes of the atmo- 

 sphere, the forms of the earth's surface, and all terrestrial 

 objects, from the vegetable covering of the land and the 

 molluscse of the ocean up to the race of man. Mankind are 

 considered according to the variety of their mental disposi- 

 tions and intellectual powers, and to the cultivation and ex- 

 altation of these as manifested in the noblest works of art. I 

 have here named the elements of a general knowledge of nature 

 wliich He scattered almost without order in the great work 



