October 17, 1912] 



NATURE 



187 



and contained in Roman thought and writing. 

 That measure is, of course, a large one. The 

 Alexandrines in particular, only partly Greek, and 

 living- and learning in cities and university towns, 

 amid libraries and observatories, first developed 

 the modern love alike of nature and of natural 

 science. From them it passed to Rome. Aratus, 

 the poet and fellow-countryman whom St. Paul 

 quoted at Athens, was one of the most popular 

 poets at Rome, and influenced, as the President 

 of the Royal Society points out, Cicero and Virgil ; 

 he might have added, through Cicero, Lucretius 

 also. Both Lucretius and Virgil, however, owed 

 more still to the prevailing Epicureanism, which 

 from the Greek schools of their time passed over to 

 and permeated Italy. Catullus and Horace and 

 Ovid fell under the same Greek influences. 



But this is not the true, genuine native Roman 

 love of nature. That love, a more superficial yet 

 in some ways more natural and pleasing thing, 

 is, as these pages show, to be found in almost all 

 the poets from Catullus to Statius and Martial, 

 in the prose-writers from Varro to Seneca. Its 

 varied expressions and manifestations constitute a 

 rich and copious subject, but Sir Archibald deals 

 with this very skilfully by arranging it under 

 different headings : the love of flowers ; the love 

 of animals ; Roman gardens ; flowers and foliage 

 in Roman art; day and night; the seasons; 

 springs, rivers, and lakes; mountains; the sea- 

 shores ; and so on. The result is that he is never 

 tedious. The reader can take up any chapter and 

 almost any page separately, and find something 

 to interest him — the character of the melancholy, 

 amorous Propertius, asking to be "put among the 

 girls " ; the clever, frivolous, querulous Ovid ; 

 the intense, direct Catullus ; the pretentious and 

 somewhat hypocritical Seneca ; the importance 

 and the character, almost personal in its signi- 

 ficance, of winds and stars to the ancient farmer 

 and seaman ; the testimony of the Pompeiian 

 wall-frescoes, half foreign, half local and native, 

 their figures Greek, their landscapes Latin — each 

 is touched in succession with a fresh eye and firm 

 hand. 



Incidentally, also, as might be expected, there 

 are references to modern writers — not only to 

 Tennyson, already alluded to, but to Spenser and 

 Shakespeare, to Cowley and Cowper, to Coleridge 

 and Keats, and, of course, to Wordsworth. Per- 

 haps one of the most striking points which is 

 made in these pages, is that the ancients too 

 possessed that 



Which is the bli 



inner eye 

 ;s of solitude.' 



Indeed, the Romans had the very expression, 



NO. 2242, VOL. go] 



for does not Ovid in his "Metamorphoses," as Sir 

 Archibald Geikie points out, write : — 



Quae natura negabat 

 Visibus humanis, oculis ea pectoris hausit? 

 To conclude, the theme is one which has been 

 touched before, notably by Prof. W. R. Hardie in 

 "Lectures on Classical Subjects," published about 

 a dozen years ago, but never has it been handled 

 so thoroughly or with more freshness and sug- 

 gestiveness than by the President of the Royal 

 Society in this volume, which we confidently 

 commend to scholars and men of science, but still 

 more confidently to the general reader. 



T. Herbert W.\rren. 



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(i) T T is always difficult for the reviewer of a 

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