36 COSMOS. 



Bcribe battle-fields, the crossing of rivers or difficult mountain 

 passes in their narrations of the struggle of man against nat- 

 ural obstacles. In the Annals of Tacitus, I am charmed with 

 the description of the untoward passage of Germanicus over 

 the Amisia, and the grand geographical delineation of the 

 mountain chains of Syria and Palestine.* Curtius has left 

 us a fine natural picture of a woody desert to the west of Hec- 

 atompylos, through which the Macedonian army had to pass 

 in the marshy region of Mazanderan.f I would refer more 

 circumstantially to this passage if our uncertainty as to the 

 age in which this writer lived did not prevent our deciding 

 what was due to the poet's own imaginiition and what was 

 derived from historic sources. 



The great encyclopedic work of the elder Pliny, which, by 

 the richness of its contents, surpasses any other production of 

 antiquity, will be more fully considered in the sequel, when 

 we enter on the " history of the contemplation of the uni- 

 verse." The natural history of Pliny, which has exercised a 

 powerful influence on the Middle Ages, is, as his nephew, the 

 younger Pliny, has elegantly remarked, *' manifold as nature 

 Itself" As the creation of an irresistible passion for a com- 

 prehensive, but often indiscriminate and irregular accumula- 

 tion of facts, this work is unequal in style, being sometimes 

 simple and narrative, and sometimes full of thought, anima- 

 tion, and rhetorical ornament, and from its very character de- 

 ficient in individual delineations of nature ; although, wher- 

 ever the connection existing between the active forces of the 

 universe, the well-ordered Cosmos {naturce Tnajestas), is made 



* Tac, Ann., ii., 23-24; Hist., v., 6. The only fragment preserved 

 by the rhetorician Seneca {Suasor., i., p. 11, Bipont) that we possess 

 of a heroic poem, in which Ovid's friend Pedo Albinovanus describes 

 the deeds of Germanicus, likewise describes the unfortunate passage of 

 the Ems (Fed. Albinov., Elegies, Amst, 1703, p. 172). Seneca con- 

 siders this description of the stormy waters as more picturesque than 

 any passage to be found in the writings of the other Roman poets. He 

 remarks, however, Latini declamatores in Oceani descriptione non nimi* 

 viguerunt; nam aut tumide scripserunt aut curiose. 



t Curt., in Alex. Magno., vi., 16. Compare Droysen, Gesch. Alex- 

 anders des Grossen, 1833, s. 26.5. In QucEst. Natur., lib. iii., c. 27-30, 

 p. 677-686, ed. Lips., 1741, of the too rhetorical Lucius Annseus Sene- 

 ca, there is a remarkable description of one of the several instances of 

 the destruction of an originally pure and subsequently sinful race, by 

 an almost universal deluge, commencing with the words Ciim fatalit 

 dies diluvii venerit; and terminating thus: peracto exitio generis huma 

 ni extiiictisque pariter feris in quarum homines i7igenia transierant 

 See, also, the description of chaotic terrestrial revolutions, in Bhagava 

 ta-Purana, bk. iii., c. 17 (ed. Burnouf, t. i., p. 441). 



