164 Summer Studies of Birds and Books chap. 



the birth of Christ, and to writings which are by 

 no means easy to deal with in the limited space of 

 an hour. But I am tempted to try the experiment, 

 for a great part of what Aristotle wrote about natural 

 history is still extant — sufficient at least to show 

 us not only that he was the first naturalist of whom 

 we have any record, but that he was a really great 

 naturalist, with far-reaching views of the whole sub- 

 ject, and with infinite perseverance and curiosity in 

 collecting facts and details. His defects are, indeed, 

 obvious enough ; we can see that he did not care, 

 or had not time, to sift the evidence for many facts 

 reported to him, and that he mixes up fact and fiction 

 in a very bewildering way. But if we try and judge 

 him, not by our own standard of knowledge and 

 criticism, but by that of an age when what we call 

 science was hardly yet born, we shall revere him 

 as the first man who set himself to collect the facts 

 of animal life, and to explain them so far as he 

 was able. 



It must be allowed, indeed, that his influence 

 on the study of natural history in the ages that 

 followed him was not entirely a wholesome one. 

 So great was the power which his vast learning, his 

 exactness, and his evident conscientiousness exercised 

 on the minds of men for eighteen centuries, that 

 naturalists — if I may use the word of them — were 

 content to follow him alike where he was right and 



