MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 
99 
phanes, and Zeno the Eleatic, which shews the vast 
research and sagacity of his observations. He has 
separately discussed the nature of colours, and of 
the objects of hearing. He has also explained the 
causes of meteors, comets or bearded stars (way«- 
rucei), earthquakes, exhalations, clouds, rain, snow, 
the galaxy, the rainbow, and other phenomena of the 
atmosphere, in a work on Meteorology. His books 
on plants and minerals have perished ; but we learn 
from himself that he had given an account of all the 
different fossils and metals. He is also said to have 
written on Comparative Anatomy, but that work no 
longer remains.* 
It is chiefly in his character as the historian and 
interpreter of Nature that Aristotle ought to be con- 
templated in a work like the present. His know- 
ledge in this department was as varied and compre- 
hensive as in political and speculative science ; his 
object being to accumulate and digest all that was 
then known of the structure and productions of the 
earth ; and if we may judge of what is lost by what 
has come down to us entire, it would be no easy 
matter to determine whether most admiration was 
* The treatise on Plants, edited with his works, is ac- 
knowledged to be by Theophrastus, whose writings, from 
the circumstances connected with their preservation, might 
naturally be confounded with those of his master. The 
treatise De Mundo, ns also the collections of wonderful 
Narratives, and perhaps the Fragment on the Winds, are 
reckoned spurious, and have been rejected from the number 
of his works, the internal evidence being against their im- 
puted authorship. 
