MEMOIR OF PLINY. 
43 
must have been totally and irretrievably lost to the 
world. 
Nearly 400 years before Pliny wrote, Aristotle 
had collected and embodied into a systematic form, 
whatever information in science (for we speak here 
of that alone) the ancient world possessed ; but he 
did more, he greatly extended the boundaries of na- 
tural knowledge, by superadding to the labours of 
his predecessors many facts and observations of his 
own, from which he elicited general principles that 
served as the first foundation of that splenckd super- 
structure, which, after a long interval, rose to such 
beauty and symmetry in its several com|)artments 
under the hands of Newton and Laplace, Linnaeus 
and Jussieu, Buffon and Cuvier. The works of the 
Greek philosopher were early imported into Italy ; 
but the Roman government, both under the Repub- 
lic and the Emperors, was too much occupied in ex- 
tending and securing its conquests, to patronise or 
encourage physical studies. That the mere love of 
nature had attracted many to these delightful pur- 
suits, in the time that elapsed between Aristotle and 
Pliny, is well known from the excerpts which they 
furnished to others ; but their works have perished 
in the wreck of ages ; and the two great pillars of 
science already named, which' mark the respective 
eras of Vespasian and Alexander the Great, stand 
forth in the wide field of antiquity — like Baalbec 
and Tadmor in the desert — in solitary grandeur; but, 
like these venerable ruins, too, dismantled and mu- 
tilated of their original proportions. 
