A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



ing the battles of the empire. He compiled his book 

 in the leisure hours stolen from sleep, often writing by 

 the light of the camp-fire. Yet he cites or quotes from 

 about four thousand works, most of which are known 

 to us only by his references. Doubtless Pliny added 

 much through his own observations. We know how 

 keen -was his desire to investigate, since he lost his life 

 through attempting to approach the crater of Vesu- 

 vius on the occasion of that memorable eruption which 

 buried the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. 



Doubtless the wandering life of the soldier had given 

 Pliny abundant opportunity for personal observation in 

 his favorite fields of botany and zoology. But the rec- 

 ords of his own observations are so intermingled with 

 knowledge drawn from books that it is difficult to dis- 

 tinguish the one from the other. Nor does this greatly 

 matter, for whether as closet-student or field-natural- 

 ist, Pliny's trait of mind is essentially that of the com- 

 piler. He was no philosophical thinker, no generalizer, 

 no path-maker in science. He lived at the close of a 

 great progressive epoch of thought; in one of those 

 static periods when numberless observers piled up an 

 immense mass of details which might advantageously 

 be sorted into a kind of encyclopaedia. Such an en- 

 cyclopaedia is the so-called Natural History of Pliny. 

 It is a vast jumble of more or less uncritical statements 

 regarding almost every field of contemporary knowl- 

 edge. The descriptions of animals and plants pre- 

 dominate, but the work as a whole would have been im- 

 mensely improved had the compiler shown a more 

 critical spirit. As it is, he seems rather disposed to 

 quote any interesting citation that he comes across in 



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