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he knew were close to him — would not they interest him as 

 much as the sun, the moon, and the stars ? Man, it may be 

 assumed, was a much more simple being in his earliest days 

 than he is now — more childlike ; and to this day, even quite 

 modern children will leave their toys to play with a puppy 

 or a kitten. I think, then, we may assume that natural his- 

 tory was the earliest subject that attracted man's attention. 

 As man progressed, his natural history studies led him to 

 discover the healing properties of various herbs, and to 

 attempt the domestication of animals ; and he became, as 

 years rolled by, an owner of flocks and herds, and probably 

 at a later date turned his attention particularly to agriculture, 

 and began to grow crops for himself and for his animals. 

 By this time man had, of course, much widened his horizon, 

 and had other interests besides the earlier paramount neces- 

 sity of getting food. He became ambitious. Perhaps at 

 this period, when man had possessions, his chief interest in 

 life was to keep his own and take his neighbours, and so the 

 study of natural history was left to be carried on by the 

 women of the tribe, or by the captive slaves, whilst the 

 highest intellects of the day turned their attention to fight- 

 ing. For ages man continued quarrelling and fighting, and 

 thus worked his way onward, till at last better days dawned, 

 and men formed larger societies under a leader or set of 

 leaders, and in such communities the conditions allowed of 

 the existence of the philosopher, the man who was able to 

 give his time to thought and to ponder on the problems of 

 the universe. Up till this time nearly all the natural history 

 known to man was of the economical kind, even as it had 

 been from the beginning. But gradually it began to be 

 studied in other aspects than the economical, and men even 

 began to write on the subject. As the oldest rocks in the 

 world are composed of the remains of still older rocks, so the 

 earliest writings on natural history show the existence of 

 still older writings before them. 



The writings of our old friend Aristotle may be taken as 

 the bedrock of natural history literature. The sources of 

 his inspiration appear to have been of two kinds. First, his 

 own wisdom arising from his great mind and his own obser- 

 vations, and, secondly, the facts and the myths which he 

 gathered from the writings of his predecessors, from the 

 hunters (or gamekeepers), the snarers of wildfowl, the fisher 

 folk and sponge divers, and from the soldiers and travellers 

 who brought home the recollections of what they had seen 

 and heard in foreign lands. Aristotle quotes many of these 



