President's Address. 11 



with other bodies, plants a^Dpear to possess life, though, when 

 compared with animals, they appear inanimate." 



With the death of Aristotle, Natural History expired in 

 the Grecian era. He left no worthy successors among his 

 countrymen to follow in his footsteps, far less to add to the 

 science he had done so much to establish; and it was not 

 until after the lapse of nearly four hundred years that a 

 solitary naturalist, the elder Pliny, again took up the study 

 of Natural History. 



Pliny is said to have written 160 volumes, of which, however, 

 only thirty-seven books on Natural History have been preserved. 

 Of this work, Cuvier says, " It is one of the most precious 

 monuments that have come down to us from ancient times, 

 and affords proof of an astonishing amount of erudition in one 

 who was a warrior and a statesman." Other writers have 

 compared Pliny to Aristotle, but beyond an ardent thirst for 

 knowledge, they had few characteristics in common. Pliny 

 made no attempt at a scientific mode of classification, further 

 than commencing with the largest group, and ending with 

 the smallest. His Natural History has been called the 

 Encyclopaedia of ancient knowledge, as it existed among the 

 Eomans, and the depository of all that was known in science 

 and the arts from the earliest ages of the human race. He 

 has been greatly extolled as a classical writer, and it has been 

 remarked that had his writings perished, it would have been 

 impossible to restore the language of Virgil and Tacitus. His 

 romantic and heroic death, during an eruption of Mount 

 Vesuvius in the year 79 of the Christian era, is touchingly told 

 by his nephew in a letter to Tacitus. 



After the death of Pliny, Natural History, as a science 

 continued in the state in which he left it for upwards of 

 fourteen hundred years. The writers during the " dark ages " 

 were fettered by authority, and limited in their scientific 

 inquiries, and amused themselves in building up what they 

 imagined to be systems of the universe. Instead of seeking 

 out by patient observation and original research, the facts of 

 nature, and reasoning upon them, they occupied themselves 

 in reducing to their own theories, every fact which seemed to 

 contradict what they considered to be a law of nature. A 



