ARISTOTLE. 51 



dentally discovered, at the end of that period, they 

 were found to be greatly injured by damp and ver- 

 min. At length they were sold to an inhabitant of 

 Athens, named Apellicon, who, however, was not 

 so much a lover of philosophy as a collector of 

 manuscripts, and who adulterated the original text 

 by his injudicious emendations and interpolations. 

 Several copies thus altered were published by him. 

 When Athens was taken by Sylla, the library of 

 this citizen was carried to Rome, where the works 

 of Aristotle were corrected by Tyrannion, a gram- 

 marian. Andronicus of Rhodes afterwards arranged 

 the whole into sections, and gave them to the world. 



According to Dr Gillies, Aristotle must have 

 " composed above 400 different treatises, of which 

 only forty-eight have been transmitted to the pre- 

 sent age. But many of these last consist of several 

 books ; and the whole of his remains together still 

 form a golden stream of Greek erudition, exceeding 

 four times the collective bulk of the Iliad and 

 Odyssey." 



He was scarcely less ambitious than his pupil 

 Alexander, and his works embrace nearly the whole 

 range of human knowledge as it existed in his day. 

 He was the inventor of the syllogistic mode of rea- 

 soning, the principles of which he lays down in his 

 work on logic. In his books on rhetoric, he has in- 

 vestigated the principles of eloquence with great 

 accuracy and precision, insomuch that they form 

 the basis of all that has since been written on the 

 subject. His work on poetics, or rather the frag- 

 ment which has come down to us under that name, 

 although almost entirely confined to the considera- 

 tion of the drama, contains principles applicable to 



