_Aristotle_
There is a little essay of Goethe's called, simply, _Die Natur_. It
comes among those tracts on Natural Science in which the poet and
philosopher turned his restless mind to problems of light and colour, of
leaf and flower, of bony skull and kindred vertebra; and it sounds like
a prose-poem, a noble paean, eulogizing the love and glorifying the
study of Nature. Some twenty-five hundred years before, Anaximander had
written a book with the same title, _Concerning Nature_, περι φυσεως
{peri physeôs}: but its subject was not the same. It was a variant of
the old traditional cosmogonies. It told of how in the beginning the
earth was without form and void. It sought to trace all things back to
the Infinite, το απειρον {to apeiron}--to That which knows no bounds of
space or time but is before all worlds, and to whose bosom again all
things, all worlds, return. For Goethe Nature meant the beauty, the all
but sensuous beauty of the world; for the older philosopher it was the
mystery of the Creative Spirit.
Than Nature, in Goethe's sense, no theme is more familiar to us, for
whom many a poet tells the story and many a lesser poet echoes the
conceit; but if there be anywhere in Greek such overt praise and worship
of Nature's beauty, I cannot call it to mind. Yet in Latin the _divini
gloria ruris_ is praised and _Natura daedala rerum_ worshipped, as we
are wont to praise and worship them, for their own sweet sakes. It is
one of the ways, one of the simpler ways, in which the Roman world seems
nearer to us than the Greek: and not only seems, but is so. For compared
with the great early civilizations, Rome is modern and of the West;
while, draw her close as we may to our hearts, Greece brings along with
her a breath of the East and a whisper of remote antiquity. A Tuscan
gentleman of to-day, like a Roman gentleman of yesterday, is at heart a
husbandman, like Cato; he is _ruris amator_, like Horace; he gets him to
his little farm or vineyard (_O rus, quando te aspiciam!_), like Atticus
or the younger Pliny. As Bacon praised his garden, so does Pliny praise
his farm, with its cornfields and meadowland, vineyard and woodland,
orchard and pasture, bee-hives and flowers. That God made the country
and man made the town was (long before Cowper) a saying of Varro's; but
in Greek I can think of no such apophthegm.
As Schiller puts it, the Greeks looked on Nature with their minds more
than with their hearts, nor ever clung to her with outspoken admiration
and affection. And Humboldt, asserting (as I would do) that the
portrayal of nature, for her own sake and in all her manifold diversity,
was foreign to the Greek idea, declares that the landscape is always the
mere background of their picture, while their foreground is filled with
the affairs and actions and thoughts of men. But all the while, as in
some old Italian picture--of Domenichino or Albani or Leonardo
himself--the subordinated background is delicately traced and
exquisitely beautiful; and sometimes we come to value it in the end more
than all the rest of the composition.
Deep down in the love of Nature, whether it be of the sensual or
intellectual kind, and in the art of observation which is its outcome
and first expression, lie the roots of all our Natural Science. All the
world over these are the heritage of all men, though the inheritance be
richer or poorer here and there: they are shown forth in the lore and
wisdom of hunter and fisherman, of shepherd and husbandman, of artist
and poet. The natural history of the ancients is not enshrined in
Aristotle and Pliny. It pervades the vast literature of classical
antiquity. For all we may say of the reticence with which, the Greeks
proclaim it, it greets us nobly in Homer, it sings to us in Anacreon,
Sicilian shepherds tune their pipes to it in Theocritus: and anon in
Virgil we dream of it to the coo of doves and the sound of bees'
industrious murmur.
Not only from such great names as these do we reach the letter and the
spirit of ancient Natural History. We must go a-wandering into the
by-ways of literature. We must eke out the scientific treatises of
Aristotle and Pliny by help of the fragments which remain of the works
of such naturalists as Speusippus or Alexander the Myndian; add to the
familiar stories of Herodotus the Indian tales of Ctesias and
Megasthenes; sit with Athenaeus and his friends at the supper table,
gleaning from cook and epicure, listening to the merry idle troop of
convivial gentlemen capping verses and spinning yarns; read Xenophon's
treatise on Hunting, study the didactic poems, the Cynegetica and
Halieutica, of Oppian and of Ovid. And then again we may hark back to
the greater world of letters, wherein poet and scholar, from petty
fabulist to the great dramatists, from Homer's majesty to Lucian's wit,
share in the love of Nature and enliven the delicate background of their
story with allusions to beast and bird.
Such allusions, refined at first by art and hallowed at last by familiar
memory, lie treasured in men's hearts and enshrine themselves in our
noblest literature. Take, of a thousand crowding instances, that great
passage in the _Iliad_ where the Greek host, disembarking on the plains
of the Scamander, is likened to a migrating flock of cranes or geese or
long-necked swans, as they fly proudly over the Asian meadows and alight
screaming by Cayster's stream--and Virgil echoes more than once the
familiar lines. The crane was a well-known bird. Its lofty flight brings
it, again in Homer, to the very gates of heaven. Hesiod and Pindar speak
of its far-off cry, heard from above the clouds: and that it 'observed
the time of its coming', 'intelligent of seasons', was a proverb old in
Hesiod's day--when the crane signalled the approach of winter, and when
it bade the husbandman make ready to plough. It follows the plough, in
Theocritus, as persistently as the wolf the kid and the peasant-lad his
sweetheart. The discipline of the migrating cranes, the serried wedge of
their ranks in flight, the good order of the resting flock, are often,
and often fancifully, described. Aristotle records how they have an
appointed leader, who keeps watch by night and in flight keeps calling
to the laggards; and all this old story Euripides, the most naturalistic
of the great tragedians, puts into verse:
The ordered host of Libyan birds avoids
The wintry storm, obedient to the call
Of their old leader, piping to his flock.
Lastly, Milton gathers up the spirit and the letter of these and many
another ancient allusion to the migrating cranes:
Part loosely wing the region; part more wise,
In common ranged in figure, wedge their way
Intelligent of seasons, and set forth
Their aery caravan, high over seas
Flying, and over lands; with mutual wing
Easing their flight; so steers the prudent crane.
But the natural history of the poets is a story without an end, and in
our estimation, however brief it be, of ancient knowledge, there are
other matters to be considered, and other points of view where we must
take our stand.
When we consider the science of the Greeks, and come quickly to love it
and slowly to see how great it was, we likewise see that it was
restricted as compared with our own, curiously partial or particular in
its limitations. The practical and 'useful' sciences of chemistry,
mechanics, and engineering, which in our modern world crowd the others
to the wall, are absent altogether, or so concealed that we forget and
pass them by. Mathematics is enthroned high over all, as it is meet she
should be; and of uncontested right she occupies her throne century
after century, from Pythagoras to Proclus, from the scattered schools of
early Hellenic civilization to the rise and fall of the great
Alexandrine University. Near beside her sits, from of old, the
daughter-science of Astronomy; and these twain were worshipped by the
greatest scientific intellects of the Greeks. But though we do not hear
of them nor read of them, we must not suppose for a moment that the
practical or technical sciences were lacking in so rich and complex a
civilization. China, that most glorious of all living monuments of
Antiquity, tells us nothing of her own chemistry, but we know that it is
there. Peep into a Chinese town, walk through its narrow streets,
thronged but quiet, wherein there is neither rumbling of coaches nor
rattling of wheels, and you shall see the nearest thing on earth to what
we hear of Sybaris. To the production of those glowing silks and
delicate porcelains and fine metal-work has gone a vast store of
chemical knowledge, traditional and empirical. So was it, precisely, in
ancient Greece; and Plato knew that it was so--that the dyer, the
perfumer, and the apothecary had subtle arts, a subtle science of their
own, a science not to be belittled nor despised. We may pass here and
there by diligent search from conjecture to assurance; analyse a
pigment, an alloy or a slag; discover from an older record than the
Greeks', the chemical prescription wherewith an Egyptian princess
darkened her eyes, or study the pictured hearth, bellows, oven,
crucibles with which the followers of Tubal-Cain smelted their ore. Once
in a way, but seldom, do we meet with ancient chemistry even in Greek
literature. There is a curious passage (its text is faulty and the
translation hard) in the story of the Argonauts, where Medea concocts a
magic brew. She put divers herbs in it, herbs yielding coloured juices
such as safflower and alkanet, and soapwort and fleawort to give
consistency or 'body' to the lye; she put in alum and blue vitriol (or
sulphate of copper), and she put in blood. The magic brew was no more
and no less than a dye, a red or purple dye, and a prodigious deal of
chemistry had gone to the making of it. For the copper was there to
produce a 'lake' or copper-salt of the vegetable alkaloids, which
copper-lakes are among the most brilliant and most permanent of
colouring matters; the alum was there as a 'mordant'; and even the blood
was doubtless there incorporated for better reasons than superstitious
ones, in all probability for the purpose of clarifying (by means of its
coagulating albumen) the seething and turbid brew.
The 'Orphic' version of the story, in which this passage occurs, is
probably an Alexandrine compilation, and whether the ingredients of the
brew had been part of the ancient legend or were merely suggested to the
poet by the knowledge of his own day we cannot tell; in either case the
prescription is old enough, and is at least pre-Byzantine by a few
centuries. Such as it is, it does not stand alone. Other fragments of
ancient chemistry, more or less akin to it, have been gathered together;
in Galen's book on _The making of Simples_, in Pliny, in Paulus
Aegineta, and for that matter in certain Egyptian papyri (especially a
certain very famous one, still extant, of which Clement of Alexandria
speaks as a secret or 'hermetic' book), we can trace the broken and
scattered stones of a great edifice of ancient chemistry.
Nevertheless, all this weight of chemical learning figures scantily in
literature, and is conspicuously absent from our conception of the
natural genius of the Greeks. We have no reason to suppose that ancient
chemistry, or any part of it, was ever peculiarly Greek, or that this
science was the especial property of any nation whatsoever; moreover it
was a trade, or a bundle of trades, whose trade-secrets were too
precious to be revealed, and so constituted not a science but a
mystery. So has it always been with chemistry, the most cosmopolitan of
sciences, the most secret of arts. Quietly and stealthily it crept
through the world; the tinker brought it with his solder and his flux;
the African tribes who were the first workers in iron passed it on to
the great metallurgists who forged Damascan and Toledan steel.
This 'trade' of Chemistry was never a science for a Gentleman, as
philosophy and mathematics were; and Plato, greatest of philosophers,
was one of the greatest of gentlemen. Long, long afterwards, Oxford said
the same thing to Robert Boyle--that Chemistry was no proper avocation
for a gentleman; but he thought otherwise, and the 'brother of the Earl
of Cork' became the Father of scientific Chemistry.
Now I take it that in regard to biology Aristotle did much the same
thing as Boyle, breaking through a similar tradition; and herein one of
the greatest of his great services is to be found. There was a wealth of
natural history before his time; but it belonged to the farmer, the
huntsman, and the fisherman--with something over (doubtless) for the
schoolboy, the idler, and the poet. But Aristotle made it a science, and
won a place for it in Philosophy. He did for it just what Pythagoras had
done (as Proclus tells us) for mathematics in an earlier age, when he
discerned the philosophy underlying the old empirical art of 'geometry',
and made it the basis of 'a liberal education'.[5]
[5] επι δε τουτοις Πυθαγορας την περι αυτην φιλοσοφιαν εις σχημα
παιδειας ελευθερου μετεστησεν. {epi de toutois Pythagoras tên peri
autên philosophian eis schêma paideias eleutherou metestêsen.}
_Procli Comment. Euclidis lib. I, Prolegom. II_ (p. 65, ed.
Friedlein).
The Mediterranean fisherman, like the Chinese fisherman or the Japanese,
has still, and always has had, a wide knowledge of all that pertains to
and accompanies his craft. Our Scottish fishermen have a limited
vocabulary, which scarce extends beyond the names of the few common
fishes with which the market is supplied. But at Marseilles or Genoa or
in the Levant they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and
shell-fish and cuttle-fish and worms and corallines, and all manner of
swimming and creeping things; they know a vast deal about the habits of
their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we 'scientific men'; they are
naturalists by tradition and by trade. Neither, by the way, must we
forget the ancient medical and anatomical learning of the great
Aesculapian guild, nor the still more recondite knowledge possessed by
various priesthoods (again like their brethren of to-day in China and
Japan) of the several creatures, sacred fish, pigeons, guinea-fowl,
snakes, cuttlefish, and what not, which time out of mind they had
reared, tended, and venerated.
Of what new facts Aristotle actually discovered it is impossible to be
sure. Could it ever be proved that he discovered many, or could it even
be shown that of his own hand he discovered nothing at all, it would
affect but little our estimate of his greatness and our admiration of
his learning. He was the first of Greek philosophers and gentlemen to
see that all these things were good to know and worthy to be told. This
was his great discovery.
I have sought elsewhere to show that Aristotle spent two years, the
happiest years perhaps of all his life--a long honeymoon--by the
sea-side in the island of Mytilene, after he had married the little
Princess, and before he began the hard work of his life: before he
taught Alexander in Macedon, and long before he spoke _urbi et orbi_ in
the Lyceum. Here it was that he learned the great bulk of his natural
history, in which, wide and general as it is, the things of the sea have
from first to last a notable predominance.
I have tried to illustrate elsewhere (as many another writer has done)
something of the variety and the depth of Aristotle's knowledge of
animals--choosing an example here and there, but only drawing a little
water from an inexhaustible well.
A famous case is that of the 'molluscs', where either Aristotle's
knowledge was exceptionally minute, or where it has come down to us with
unusual completeness.
These are the cuttle fish, which have now surrendered their Aristotelian
name of 'molluscs' to that greater group which is seen to include them,
together with the shell-fish or 'ostracoderma' of Aristotle. These
cuttle-fishes are creatures that we seldom see, but in the Mediterranean
they are an article of food and many kinds are known to the fishermen.
All or wellnigh all of these many kinds were known to Aristotle. He
described their form and their anatomy, their habits, their development,
all with such faithful accuracy that what we can add to-day seems of
secondary importance. He begins with a methodical description of the
general form, tells us of the body and fins, of the eight arms with
their rows of suckers, of the abnormal position of the head. He points
out the two long arms of Sepia and of the calamaries, and their absence
in the octopus; and he tells us, what was only confirmed of late, that
with these two long arms the creature clings to the rock and sways about
like a ship at anchor. He describes the great eyes, the two big teeth
forming the beak; and he dissects the whole structure of the gut, with
its long gullet, its round crop, its stomach and the little coiled
coecal diverticulum: dissecting not only one but several species, and
noting differences that were not observed again till Cuvier re-dissected
them. He describes the funnel and its relation to the mantle-sac, and
the ink-bag, which he shows to be largest in Sepia of all others. And
here, by the way, he seems to make one of those apparent errors that, as
it happens, turn out to be justified: for he tells us that in Octopus,
unlike the rest, the funnel is on the upper side; the fact being that
when the creature lies prone upon the ground, with all its arms
outspread, the funnel-tube (instead of being flattened out beneath the
creature's prostrate body) is long enough to protrude upwards between
arms and head, and to appear on one side or other thereof, in a
position apparently the reverse of its natural one. He describes the
character of the cuttle-bone in Sepia, and of the horny pen which takes
its place in the various calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar
structure in Octopus. He dissects in both sexes the reproductive organs,
noting without exception all their essential and complicated parts; and
he had figured these in his lost volume of anatomical diagrams. He
describes the various kinds of eggs, and, with still more surprising
knowledge, shows us the little embryo cuttle-fish, with its great
yolk-sac attached, in apparent contrast to the chick's, to the little
creature's developing head.
But there is one other remarkable feature that he knew ages before it
was rediscovered, almost in our own time. In certain male cuttle-fishes,
in the breeding season, one of the arms develops in a curious fashion
into a long coiled whip-lash, and in the act of breeding may then be
transferred to the mantle-cavity of the female. Cuvier himself knew
nothing of the nature or the function of this separated arm, and indeed,
if I am not mistaken, it was he who mistook it for a parasitic worm. But
Aristotle tells us of its use and its temporary development, and of its
structure in detail, and his description tallies closely with the
accounts of the most recent writers.
A scarcely less minute account follows of the 'Malacostraca' or
crustaceans, the lobsters and the crabs, the shrimps and the prawns, and
others of their kind, a chapter to which Cuvier devoted a celebrated
essay. There be many kinds of crabs--the common kind, the big 'granny'
crabs, the little horsemen-crabs, that scamper over the sand and which
are for the most part empty, that is to say, whose respiratory cavities
are exceptionally large; and there are the freshwater crabs. There are
the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are
the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or
'langoustes', their spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which
turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller,
smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with
its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the
end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In
more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many
limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions
of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the
comparison or contrast between the two is drawn with elaborate
precision. In the former, besides other differences between male and
female, the female is said to have the 'first foot' (or leg) bifurcate,
while in the male it is undivided. It seems a trifling matter, but it is
true; it is so small a point that I searched long before at last I found
mention made of it in a German monograph. The puzzling thing is that it
is (as we should say) the last and not the first leg which is so
distinguished; but after all, it is only a convention of our own to
count the limbs from before backwards. To inspect a lobster's limbs, we
lay it on its back (as Aristotle did), and see the legs overlapping,
each hinder one above the one before; the hindmost is the first we see,
and the one we must first lift up to inspect the others.
Aristotle's account of fishes is a prodigious history of habits, food,
migrations, modes of capture, times and ways of spawning, and anatomical
details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even illustrate
this astonishing Ichthyology. It is not always easy to understand--but
the obstacle lies often, I take it, in our own ignorance. The
identification of species is not always plain, for here as elsewhere
Aristotle did not reckon with a time or place where the familiar words
of Greek should be unknown or their homely significance forgotten. Among
the great host of fish-names there are several referring, somehow or
other, to the Grey Mullet, which puzzle both naturalist and
lexicographer. A young officer told me the other day how he had watched
an Arab fisherman emptying out his creel of Grey Mullet on some Syrian
beach, and the Arab gave four if not five names to as many different
kinds, betwixt which my friend could see no difference whatsoever. Had
my friend been an ichthyologist he would doubtless have noticed that one
had eyelids and the others none; that one had little brushes on its
lips, another a small but wide-open slit under the jaw, another a yellow
spot on its gill-covers, and so on. The Mullets are a difficult group,
but Aristotle, like the Arab fisherman, evidently recognized their fine
distinctions and employed the appropriate names. Again, Aristotle speaks
of a certain nest-building fish, the 'phycis', and regarding this Cuvier
fell into error (where once upon a time I followed him). In Cuvier's
time there was but one nest-building fish known such as to suit,
apparently, the passage, namely the little black goby; but after
Cuvier's day the nest-building habits of the 'wrasses' became known to
naturalists, as they had doubtless been known ages before to the
fishermen--and to Aristotle.
Like almost every other little point on which we happen to touch, we
might make this one the starting-point (here comes in the delight and
fascination of the interpreter's task!) for other stories.
Speusippus, Plato's successor in the Academy, was both philosopher and
naturalist, and we may take it, if we please, that his leaning towards
biology, and the biological trend which at this time became more and
more marked in Athenian philosophy, were not unconnected with the great
impulse which Aristotle had given. However this may be, Speusippus wrote
a book περι Ὁμοιων {peri Homoiôn} 'Concerning Resemblances'; and this,
of which we only possess a few fragmentary sentences, must have been a
very curious and an interesting book. He mentions, among other similar
cases, that our little fish _phycis_ has a close outward semblance to
the sea-perch; and this is enough to clinch the proof that Aristotle's
nest-building fish was not a goby but a wrasse. The whole purport of
Speusippus's book seems to have been to discuss how, or why, with all
Nature's apparently infinite variety, certain animals have a singularly
close resemblance to certain others, though they be quite distinct in
kind. It is a problem which perplexes us still, when we are astonished
and even deluded by the likeness between a wasp and a hover-fly, a
merlin and a cuckoo. In certain extreme cases we call it 'mimicry', and
invoke hypotheses to account for this 'mimetic' resemblance; and those
of us who reject these hypotheses must fain take refuge in others, as
far-reaching in their way. This at least we know, that Speusippus seized
upon a real problem of biology, of lasting interest and even of
fundamental importance.
To come back to Aristotle and his fishes, let us glance at one little
point more. The reproduction of the eel is an ancient puzzle, which has
found its full solution only in our own day. While the salmon, for
instance, comes up the river to breed and goes down again to the sea,
the eel goes down to the ocean to spawn, and the old eels come back no
more but perish in the great waters. The eel's egg develops into a
little flattened, transparent fish, altogether different in outward
appearance from an eel, which turns afterwards into a young eel or
'elver'; and Professor Grassi, who had a big share in elucidating the
whole matter, tells us the curious fact that he found the Sicilian
fishermen well acquainted with the little transparent larva (the
_Leptocephalus_ of modern naturalists), that they knew well what it was,
and that they had a name for it--_Casentula_. Now Aristotle, in a
passage which I think has been much misunderstood (and which we must
admit to be in part erroneous), tells us that the eel develops from what
he calls γης εντερα {gês entera}, a word which we translate, literally,
the 'guts of the earth', and which commentators interpret as
'earthworms'! But in Sicilian Doric, γης εντερα {gês entera} would at
once become γας εντερα {gas entera}; and between 'Gasentera' and the
modern Sicilian 'Casentula' there is scarce a hairbreadth's difference.
So we may be permitted to suppose that here again Aristotle was
singularly and accurately informed; and that he knew by sight and name
the little larva of the eel, whose discovery and identification is one
of the modest triumphs of recent investigation.
Aristotle's many pages on fishes are delightful reading. The anatomist
may read of such recondite matters as the _placenta vitellina_ of the
smooth dog-fish, whereby the viviparous embryo is nourished within the
womb, after a fashion analogous to that of mammalian embryology--a
phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Müller, and which excited
him to enthusiastic admiration of Aristotle's minute and faithful
anatomy. Again we may read of the periodic migration of the tunnies, of
the great net or 'madrague' in which they are captured, and of the
watchmen, the θυννοσκοποι {thynnoskopoi}, the 'hooers' of our ancient
Cornish fishery, who give warning from tower or headland of the
approaching shoal. The student may learn what manner of fish it was (the
great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed fin-spine--most primitive of
spear-heads--Ulysses was slain; and again, he may learn not a little
about that ναρκη {narkê}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master
Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment.
In rambling fashion Aristotle has a deal to tell us about insects, and
he has left us a sort of treatise on the whole natural history of the
bee. He knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his
day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took
the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the
laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses
the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are
drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells
us many curious things about the economy of the hive and the arts of the
bee-keeper, some of which things have a very modern and familiar look
about them: for instance, the use of a net or screen to keep out the
drones, a net so nicely contrived that these sturdy fellows are just
kept out, while the leaner, slenderer workers are just let in. But it
would be a long, long story to tell of Aristotle's knowledge of the bee,
and to compare it with what is, haply, the still deeper skill and
learning of that master of bee-craft, Virgil.
Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow
the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might
read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the
hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in
Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey--as a baby's lips are
touched with it even unto this day; trace their association with
Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian
Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred
sweet references--to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill
Hymettus. Perhaps, at last, we might even happen on the place where
Origen seems so strangely to foreshadow Shakespeare--speaking of the
king of the bees with his retinue of courtiers (his officers of sorts),
the relays of workmen (the poor mechanic porters crowding in), the
punishment of the idle (where some, like magistrates, correct at home),
the wars, the vanquished, and the plunder (which pillage they with merry
march bring home To the tent-royal of their Emperor).
Go back to Aristotle, and we may listen to him again while he talks of
many other kindred insects: of the humble-bee and its kind, of the
mason-bee with its hard round nest of clay, of the robber-bees, and of
the various wasps and hornets; or (still more curiously and
unexpectedly) of the hunter-wasp or 'ichneumon', and how it kills the
spider, carries it home to its nest, and lays its eggs in its poor body,
that the little wasp-grubs may afterwards be fed. Or again of the great
wasps which he calls Anthrenae, and how they chase the big flies, and
cut off their heads, and fly away with the rest of the carcass--all
agreeing to the very letter with what Henri Fabre tells us of a certain
large wasp of Southern Europe, and how it captures the big 'taons' or
horse-flies: 'Pour donner le coup de grâce à leurs Taons mal sacrifiés,
et se débattants encore entre les pattes du ravisseur, j'ai vu des
Bembex mâchonner la tête et le thorax des victimes.' Verily, there is
nothing new under the sun.
With the metamorphoses of various insects Aristotle was well acquainted.
He knew how the house-fly passes its early stages in a dung-hill, and
how the grubs of the big horse-flies and Tabanids live in decayed wood;
how certain little flies or gnats are engendered (as he calls it) in the
slime of vinegar. He relates with great care and accuracy the
life-history of the common gnat, from its aquatic larva, the little red
'blood-worm' of our pools; he describes them wriggling about like tiny
bits of red weed, in the water of some half-empty well; and he explains,
finally, the change by which they become stiff and motionless and hard,
until a husk breaks away and the little gnat is seen sitting upon it;
and by and by the sun's heat or a puff of wind starts it off, and away
it flies.
Some of these stories are indeed remarkable, for the events related are
more or less hidden and obscure; and so, with all this knowledge at
hand, it is not a little strange that Aristotle has very little indeed
to tell us about the far more obvious phenomena of the life-history of
the butterfly, and of the several kinds of butterflies and moths. He
does tell us briefly that the butterfly comes from a caterpillar, which
lives on cabbage-leaves and feeds voraciously, then turns into a
chrysalis and eats no more, nor has it a mouth to eat withal; it is hard
and, as it were, dead, but yet it moves and wriggles when you touch it,
and after a while the husk bursts and out comes the butterfly. The
account is good enough, so far as it goes, but nevertheless Aristotle
shows no affection for the butterfly, does not linger and dally over it,
tells no stories about it. This is all of a piece with the rest of
Greek literature, and poetry in particular, where allusions to the
butterfly are scanty and rare. I think the Greeks found something
ominous or uncanny, something not to be lightly spoken of, in that all
but disembodied spirit which we call a butterfly, and they called by the
name of ψυχη {psychê}, the Soul. They had a curious name (νεκυδαλλος
{nekydallos}) for the pupa. It sounds like a 'little corpse' (νεκυς
{nekys}); and like a little corpse within its shroud or coffin the pupa
sleeps in its cocoon. A late poet describes the butterfly 'coming back
from the grave to the light of day'; and certain of the Fathers of the
Church, St. Basil in particular, point the moral accordingly, and draw a
doubtless time-honoured allegory of the Resurrection and the Life from
the grub which is not dead but sleepeth, and the butterfly which (as it
were) is raised in glory.
Of one large moth, Aristotle gives us an account which has been a puzzle
to many. This begins as a great grub or caterpillar, with (as it were)
horns; and, growing by easy stages, it spins at length a cocoon. There
is a class of women who unwind and reel off the cocoons, and afterwards
weave a fabric with the thread; and a certain woman of Cos is credited
with the invention of this fabric. This is, at first sight, a plain and
straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not
till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in Justinian's
reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which is its food were
brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece. We learn something of
this Coan silkworm from Pliny, who tells us that it lived on the ash and
oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and other of the
Fathers we glean a little more--for instance, that the larva was covered
with thick-set hairs, and that the cocoon was of a loose material
something like a spider's web. All this agrees in every particular with
a certain large moth (_Lasiocampa otus_), which spins a rough cocoon not
unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in south-eastern Europe,
feeding on the cypress and the oak. Many other silkworms besides the
true or common one are still employed, worms which yield the Tussore
silks of India and other kindred silks in Japan; and so likewise was
this rough silky fabric spun and woven in Hellas, until in course of
time it was surpassed and superseded by the finer produce of the 'Seric
worm', and the older industry died out and was utterly forgotten.
Ere we leave the subject of insects let us linger a moment over one
which the Greeks loved, and loved most of all. When as schoolboys we
first began to read our Thucydides, we met in the very beginning with
the story of how rich Athenians wore Golden Grasshoppers (as the
schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of
course, no common grasshoppers, but the little Cicadas, whose sharp
chirrup seemed delightful music to the Greeks. It is unpleasant to our
ears, as Browning found it; but in a multitude of Greek poets, in
Alcaeus and Anacreon and all through the whole Anthology, we hear its
praise. We have it, for instance, in the _Birds_:
Though the hot sun be shining in the sky
In the deep flowery meadow-grass I lie:
To listen to the shrill melodious tune
Of crickets, thrilled to ecstasy at noon.
Of this familiar and beloved insect Aristotle gives a copious account.
He describes two separate species, which we still recognize easily; a
larger one and the better singer, the other smaller and the first to
come and last to go with the summer season. He recognized the curious
vocal organ, or vibratory drum, at the cicada's waist, and saw that some
cicadas possessed it and others not; and he knew, as the poets also
knew, that it was the males who sang, while their wives listened and
were silent. He tells how the cicada is absent from treeless countries,
as, for instance, from Cyrene (and why, I wonder, does he go all the way
to Cyrene for his illustration?), neither is it heard in deep and
sunless woods; but in the olive-groves you hear it at its best, for an
olive-grove is sparse and the sun comes through. Then he tells us
briefly, but with remarkable accuracy, the story of the creature's life:
how the female, with her long ovipositor, lays her eggs deep down in
dead, hollow twigs, such as the canes on which the vines are propped;
how the brood, when they escape from the egg, burrow underground; how
later on they emerge, especially in rainy weather, when the rains have
softened the soil; how then the larva changes into another form, the
so-called 'nymph'; and how at last, when summer comes, the skin of the
nymph breaks and the perfect insect issues forth, changes colour, and
begins to sing. In Aristophanes, in Theocritus, in Lucretius, Virgil,
Martial, and in the Anthology, we may gather up a host of poetical
allusions to the natural history thus simply epitomized.
The Book about Animals, the _Historia Animalium_ as we say, from which I
have quoted these few examples of Aristotle's store of information, may
be taken to represent the first necessary stage of scientific inquiry.
There is a kind of _manual_ philosophy (as old Lord Monboddo called it)
which investigates facts which escape the vulgar, and may be called the
_anecdotes_ or _secret history_ of nature. In this fascinating pursuit
Gilbert White excelled, and John Ray and many another--the whole
brotherhood of simple naturalists. But such accumulated knowledge of
facts is but the foundation of a philosophy; and 'nothing deserves the
name of philosophy, except what explains the causes and principles of
things'. Aristotle would have done much had he merely shown (as Gilbert
White showed to the country gentlemen of his day) that the minute
observation of nature was something worth the scholar and the
gentleman's while; but, far more than this, he made a Science of natural
knowledge, and set it once for all within the realm of Philosophy. He
set it side by side with the more ancient science of Astronomy, which
for many hundred years in Egypt and the East, and for some few centuries
in Hellas, had occupied the mind of philosophers and the attention of
educated men. I have quoted before a great sentence in which he explains
his purpose, and makes excuse for his temerity. 'The glory, doubtless,
of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation
of these lowly things; for the sun and stars are born not, neither do
they decay, but are eternal and divine. But the heavens are high and
afar off, and of celestial things the knowledge that our senses give us
is scanty and dim. The living creatures, on the other hand, are at our
door, and if we so desire it we may gain ample and certain knowledge of
each and all. We take pleasure in the beauty of a statue, shall not then
the living fill us with delight; and all the more if in the spirit of
philosophy we search for causes and recognize the evidences of design.
Then will nature's purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere
revealed, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another
of the Beautiful.'
Aristotle's voluminous writings have come down to us through many grave
vicissitudes. The greatest of them all are happily intact, or very
nearly so; but some are lost and others have suffered disorder and
corruption. The work known as the 'Parts of Animals' opens (as our text
has it) with a chapter which seems meant for a general exordium to the
whole series of biological treatises; and I know no chapter in all
Aristotle's books which better shows (in plainer English or easier
Greek) the master-hand of the great Teacher and Philosopher. He begins
by telling us (it has ever since been a common saying) that every
science, every branch of knowledge, admits of two sorts of
proficiency--that which may properly be termed scientific knowledge, and
that which is within the reach of ordinary educated men. He proceeds to
discuss the 'method' of scientific inquiry, whether we should begin with
the specific and proceed to the general, or whether we are to deal first
with common or generical characters and thereafterward with special
peculiarities. Are we entitled to treat of animals, as is done in
mathematical astronomy, by dealing first with facts or phenomena and
then proceeding to discover and relate their several causes? At once
this leads to a brief discussion (elaborated elsewhere) of the two great
Causes, or aspects of cause--the final cause and the 'moving' or
efficient cause--the _reason why_ or the purpose for which, and the
antecedent cause which, _of necessity_, brings a thing to be such as it
is. Here is one of the great crucial questions of philosophy, and
Aristotle's leaning to the side of the Final Cause has been a dominant
influence upon the minds of men throughout the whole history of
learning. Empedocles had taken another view: he held that the rain comes
when it listeth, or 'of necessity'; that we have no right to suppose it
comes to make the corn grow in spring, any more than to spoil the autumn
sheaves: that the teeth grow by the operation of some natural (or
physical) law, and that their apparent and undoubted fitness for cutting
and grinding is not purposeful but coincident; that the backbone is
divided into vertebrae because of the antecedent forces, or flexions,
which act upon it in the womb. And Empedocles proceeds to the great
evolutionary deduction, the clear prevision of Darwin's philosophy, that
fit and unfit arise alike, but that what is fit to survive does survive
and what is unfit perishes.
The story is far too long and the theme involved too grave and difficult
for treatment here. But I would venture to suggest that Aristotle
inclined to slur over the physical and lean the more to the final cause,
for this simple reason (whatever other reasons there may be), that he
was a better biologist than a physicist: that he lacked somewhat the
mathematical turn of mind which was intrinsic to the older schools of
philosophy. For better for worse the course he took, the choice he made,
was of incalculable import, and had power for centuries to guide (dare
we say, to bias) the teaching of the schools, the progress of learning,
and the innermost beliefs of men.
In this one short but pregnant chapter of Aristotle's there is far more
than we can hope even to epitomize. He has much to say in it of
'classification', an important matter indeed, and he discusses it as a
great logician should, in all its rigour. Many commentators have sought
for Aristotle's 'classification of animals'; for my part I have never
found it, and, in our sense of the word, I am certain it is not there.
An unbending, unchanging classification of animals would have been
something foreign to all his logic; it is all very well, it becomes
practically necessary, when we have to arrange our animals on the
shelves of a museum or in the arid pages of a 'systematic' catalogue;
and it takes a new complexion when, or if, we can attain to a real or
historical classification, following lines of actual descent and based
on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it seems to
me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions
either of a complete _scala naturae_ or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He
classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a
dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At
one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, at
another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into the wild
and the tame, the social and the solitary, and so on in endless ways
besides. At the same time he had a quick eye for the great natural
groups, such 'genera' (as he called them) as Fish or Bird, Insect or
Mollusc. So it comes to pass that, while he fashioned no hard and fast
scheme of classification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have thought it
vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or temporary
classifications come together after all, though in a somewhat hazy
pattern, yet in a very beautiful and coherent parti-coloured web. And
though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite
orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the
characteristic which Molière hits upon in _Les Femmes savantes_,--'Je
m'attache _pour l'ordre_ au péripatétisme'.
Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he
indicates that there are more ways than one of relating, or
classifying, our facts; that, for instance, it may be equally proper and
necessary to deal now with the animals and their several parts or
properties, and at another time with the parts or properties as such,
explaining and illustrating them in turn by the several animals which
display or possess them. The 'Parts of Animals' is, then, a corollary, a
necessary corollary, to the more anecdotal _Historia Animalium_. And yet
again, there is a third alternative--to discuss the great functions or
actions or potentialities of the organism, as it were first of all in
the abstract, and then to correlate them with the parts which in this or
that creature are provided and are 'designed' to effect them. This
involves the conception and the writing of separate physiological
treatises on such themes as Respiration, Locomotion, on Sleeping and
Waking, and lastly (and in some respects the most ambitious, most
erudite, and most astonishing of them all) the great account of the
Generation of Animals.
So the whole range, we might say the whole conceivable range, of
biological science is sketched out, and the greater part of the great
canvas is painted in. But to bring it into touch with human life, and to
make good its claim to the high places of philosophy, we must go yet
farther and study Life itself, and what men call the Soul. So grows the
great conception. We begin with trivial anecdote, with the things that
fisherman, huntsman, peasant know; the sciences of zoology, anatomy,
physiology take shape before our very eyes; and by evening we sit humbly
at the feet of the great teacher of Life itself, the historian of the
Soul. It is not for us to attempt to show that even here the story does
not end, but the highest chapters of philosophy begin. Then, when we
remember that this short narrative of ours is but the faintest
adumbration of one side only of the philosopher's many-sided task and
enterprise, we begin to rise towards a comprehension of Roger Bacon's
saying, that 'although Aristotle did not arrive at the end of knowledge,
he set in order all parts of philosophy'. In the same spirit a modern
critic declares: 'Il n'a seulement défini et constitué chacune des
parties de la science; il en a de plus montré le lien et l'unité'.
Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is full of old saws, tags of wisdom, jewels
five words long. Here is such a one, good for teacher and pupil
alike--Δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα {Dei pisteuein ton manthanonta}. It
tells us that the road to Learning lies through Faith; and it means that
to be a scholar one should have a heart as well as brains.
By reason partly of extraneous interpolation, but doubtless also through
a lingering credulity from which even philosophers are not immune, we
find in Aristotle many a strange story. The goats that breathe through
their ears, the vulture impregnated by the wind, the eagle that dies of
hunger, the stag caught by music, the salamander which walks through
fire, the unicorn, the mantichore, are but a few of the 'Vulgar Errors'
or 'Received Tenents' (as Sir Thomas Browne has it) which are
perpetuated, not originated, in the _Historia Animalium_. Some of them
come, through Persia, from the farther East: and others (we meet with
them once more in Horapollo the Egyptian priest) are but the exoteric or
allegorical expression of the arcana of ancient Egyptian religion.
So it comes to pass that for two thousand years and throughout all lands
men have come to Aristotle, and found in him information and
instruction--that which they desired. Arab and Moor and Syrian and Jew
treasured his books while the western world sat in darkness; the great
centuries of Scholasticism hung upon his words; the oldest of our
Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were based upon his teaching, yea,
all but established for his study. Where he has been, there, seen or
unseen, his influence remains; even the Moor and the Arab find in him,
to this day, a teacher after their own hearts: a teacher of eternal
verities, telling of sleep and dreams, of youth and age, of life and
death, of generation and corruption, of growth and of decay: a guide to
the book of Nature, a revealer of the Spirit, a prophet of the works of
God.
The purpose of these little essays, I have been told (though I had half
forgotten it), is to help though ever so little to defend and justify
the study of the language and the vast literature of Greece. It is a
task for which I am unfitted and unprepared. When Oliver Goldsmith
proposed to teach Greek at Leyden, where he 'had been told it was a
desideratum', the Principal of that celebrated University met him (as we
all know) with weighty objections. 'I never learned Greek', said the
Principal, 'and I don't find that I have ever missed it. I have had a
Doctor's cap and gown without Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year
without Greek; and, in short', continued he, 'as I don't know Greek, I
do not believe there is any good in it.'--I have heard or read the story
again and again, for is it not written in the _Vicar of Wakefield_? But
I never heard that any man, not Goldsmith himself, attempted to confute
the argument. I agree for the most part with the Principal, and can see
clearly that all the Greek that Goldsmith knew, and all the Greek in all
the world, would have meant nothing and done nothing for him. But there
is and will be many another who finds in Greek wisdom and sweet Hellenic
speech something which he needs must have, and lacking which he would be
poor indeed: something which is as a staff in his hand, a light upon his
path, a lantern to his feet.
In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon
says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest
servitude and depression, were still possessed, 'of a golden key that
could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific
language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the
abstractions of philosophy'.
Our very lives seem prolonged by the recollection of antiquity; for, as
Cicero says, not to know what has been transacted in former times is to
continue always a child. I borrow the citation from Dr. Johnson, who
reminds us also of a saying of Aristotle himself, that as students we
ought first to examine and understand what has been written by the
ancients, and then cast our eyes round upon the world. And Johnson
prefaces both quotations by another:
Tibi res antiquae laudis et artis
ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes.
But now I, who have dared to draw my tiny draft from Aristotle's great
well, seem after all to be seeking an excuse, seeking it in example and
precept. Precept, at least, I know to be of no avail. My father spent
all the many days of his life in the study of Greek; you might suppose
it was for Wisdom's sake,--but my father was a modest man. The fact is,
he did it for a simpler reason still, a very curious reason, to be
whispered rather than told: he did it _for love_.
Nigh forty years ago, I first stepped out on the east-windy streets of a
certain lean and hungry town (lean, I mean, as regards scholarship)
where it was to be my lot to spend thereafter many and many a year. And
the very first thing I saw there was an inscription over a very humble
doorway, '_Hic mecum habitant Dante, Cervantes, Molière_'. It was the
home of a poor schoolmaster, who as a teacher of languages eked out the
scanty profits of his school. I was not a little comforted by the
announcement. So the poor scholar, looking on the ragged regiment of his
few books, is helped, consoled, exalted by the reflection: _Hic mecum
habitant ... Homerus, Plato, Aristoteles_. And were one in a moment of
inadvertence to inquire of him why he occupied himself with Greek, he
might perchance stammer (like Dominie Sampson) an almost inarticulate
reply; but more probably he would be stricken speechless by the enormous
outrage of the request, and the reason of his devotion would be hidden
from the questioner for ever.