INFLUENCE OF THE MACEDONIAN CAMPAIGNS. 527 



sia, constituted one satrapy of ancient Persia.* May not the 

 knowledge of the form and habits of the animals above referred 

 to, and which, for the most part, was comprised in short 

 notices, have been transmitted to Aristotle, independently of 



* The five animals named in the text, and especially the hippelaphus 

 (horse-stag with a long mane), the hippardion, the Bactrian camel and 

 the buffalo, are instanced by Cuvier as proofs of the later composition 

 of Aristotle's Historia Animalium (Hist, des Sciences Nat., t. i. p. 

 154). Cuvier, in the fourth volume of his admirable Reclierches sur les 

 Ossemens fossiles, 1823, pp. 40-43 and p. 502, distinguishes between 

 two Asiatic stags with manes, which he calls Cervus hippelaphus and 

 Cervus aristotelis. He originally regarded the first-named, of which he 

 had seen a living specimen in London, and of which Diard had sent 

 him skins and antlers from Sumatra, as Aristotle's hippelaphus from 

 Arachosia (Hist, de Animal., ii. 2, 3, and 4, t. i. pp. 43, 44, Schneider) ; 

 but he afterwards thought that a stag's head, sent to him from Bengal by 

 Duvaucel, agreed still better, according to the drawing of the entire large 

 animal, with the Stagirite's description of the hippelaphus. This stag, 

 which is indigenous in the mountains of Sylhet in Bengal, in Nepaul, 

 and in the country east of the Indus, next received the name of Cervus 

 aristotelis. If, in the same chapter in which Aristotle speaks generally 

 of animals with manes, the horse-stag (Equicervus), and the Indian 

 guepard or hunting tiger (Fclis jubata), are both understood, Schneider 

 (t. iii. p. 66) considers the reading irapStov preferable to that of ro 

 iTTTrapdiov. The latter reading would be best interpreted to mean the 

 giraffe, as Pallas also conjectures (Spicileg. Zool., fasc. i. p. 4). If Aristo- 

 tle had himself seen the guepard, and not merely heard it described, how 

 could he have failed to notice non-retractile claws in a feline animal ] 

 It is also surprising that Aristotle, who is always so accurate, if, as 

 August Wilhelm von Schlegel maintains, he had a menagerie near his 

 residence at Athens, and had himself dissected one of the Elephants 

 taken at Arbela, should have failed to describe the small opening near the 

 temples of the animal, where at the rutting season a strong smelling fluid 

 is secreted, often alluded to by the Indian poets. (Schlegel's Indische 

 Bibliothek, bd. i. s. 163--166.) I notice this apparently trifling circum- 

 stance thus particularly, because the above-mentioned small aperture 

 was made known to us from the accounts of Megasthenes, to whom, never- 

 theless, no one would be led to ascribe anatomical knowledge. (Strabo, 

 lib. xv. pp. 704 and 705, Casaub.) I find nothing in the different zoolo- 

 gical works of Aristotle which have come down to us, that necessarily 

 implies his having had the opportunity of making direct observations on 

 elephants, or of his having dissected any. Although it is most probable 

 that the Historia Animalium was completed before Alexander's cam- 

 paigns in Asia Minor, there is undoubtedly a possibility that the work 

 may, as Stahr supposes (Aristotelia, th. ii. s. 98), have continued to 

 receive additions until the end of the author's life, Olymp. 114, 3, and 

 therefore three years after the death o^ Alexander; but we have no 



