The Legacy of Greece Part 7

[5] ep? de t??t??? ???a???a? t?? pe?? a?t?? f???s?f?a? e?? s??a pa?de?a? e?e??e??? etest?se?. {epi de toutois Pythagoras ten peri auten philosophian eis schema paideias eleutherou metestesen.} _Procli Comment. Euclidis lib. I, Prolegom. II_ (p. 65, ed.

Friedlein).

The Mediterranean fisherman, like the Chinese fisherman or the j.a.panese, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles or Genoa or in the Levant they have names for many hundreds of species, of fish and sh.e.l.l-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 j.a.pan) 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 sh.e.l.l-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 s.h.i.+p 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 p.r.o.ne 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 h.o.r.n.y pen which takes its place in the various calamaries, and notes the lack of any similar structure in Octopus. He dissects in both s.e.xes 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 hors.e.m.e.n-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 sp.a.w.n. 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 sp.a.w.ning, and anatomical details; but it is not here that we can elucidate or even ill.u.s.trate this astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage, namely the little black goby; but after Cuvier's day the nest-building habits of the 'wra.s.ses' 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 pe?? ????? {peri h.o.m.oion} '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 wra.s.se. 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 sp.a.w.n, 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 Gra.s.si, 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 pa.s.sage 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 ??? e?te?a {ges entera}, a word which we translate, literally, the 'guts of the earth', and which commentators interpret as 'earthworms'! But in Sicilian Doric, ??? e?te?a {ges entera} would at once become ?a? e?te?a {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 fas.h.i.+on a.n.a.logous to that of mammalian embryology--a phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Muller, 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 ?????s??p?? {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 ?a??? {narke}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment.

In rambling fas.h.i.+on 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 st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.sociation 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 carca.s.s--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 grace a leurs Taons mal sacrifies, et se debattants encore entre les pattes du ravisseur, j'ai vu des Bembex machonner la tete 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 pa.s.ses 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 b.u.t.terfly, and of the several kinds of b.u.t.terflies and moths. He does tell us briefly that the b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terfly. The account is good enough, so far as it goes, but nevertheless Aristotle shows no affection for the b.u.t.terfly, 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 b.u.t.terfly, and they called by the name of ???? {psyche}, the Soul. They had a curious name (?e??da????

{nekydallos}) for the pupa. It sounds like a 'little corpse' (?e???

{nekys}); and like a little corpse within its shroud or coffin the pupa sleeps in its coc.o.o.n. A late poet describes the b.u.t.terfly '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 b.u.t.terfly 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 coc.o.o.n. There is a cla.s.s of women who unwind and reel off the coc.o.o.ns, 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 coc.o.o.n 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 coc.o.o.n 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 j.a.pan; and so likewise was this rough silky fabric spun and woven in h.e.l.las, until in course of time it was surpa.s.sed 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 Gra.s.shoppers (as the schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of course, no common gra.s.shoppers, 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 mult.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+ning in the sky In the deep flowery meadow-gra.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration?), 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 spa.r.s.e 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 acc.u.mulated 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 h.e.l.las, 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 ent.i.tled 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 'cla.s.sification', an important matter indeed, and he discusses it as a great logician should, in all its rigour. Many commentators have sought for Aristotle's 'cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sification, 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 cla.s.sified 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 pa.s.s that, while he fas.h.i.+oned no hard and fast scheme of cla.s.sification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have thought it vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or temporary cla.s.sifications 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 Moliere hits upon in _Les Femmes savantes_,--'Je m'attache _pour l'ordre_ au peripatetisme'.

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 cla.s.sifying, 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 ill.u.s.trating 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 defini et const.i.tue chacune des parties de la science; il en a de plus montre le lien et l'unite'.

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--?e? p?ste?e?? t?? a??a???ta {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 mantich.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d.

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 Princ.i.p.al of that celebrated University met him (as we all know) with weighty objections. 'I never learned Greek', said the Princ.i.p.al, '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 Princ.i.p.al, 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 scholars.h.i.+p) 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 mec.u.m habitant Dante, Cervantes, Moliere_'. 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 mec.u.m 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.

D'ARCY WENTWORTH THOMPSON.

BIOLOGY

_Before Aristotle_

What is science? It is a question that cannot be answered easily, nor perhaps answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the field exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow. But we can see science in its growth and we can say that being a process it can exist only as growth. Where does the science of biology begin? Again we cannot say, but we can watch its evolution and its progress. Among the Greeks the accurate observation of living forms, which is at least one of the essentials of biological science, goes back very far. The word _Biology_, used in our sense, would, it is true, have been an impossibility among them, for _bios_ refers to the life of man and could not be applied, except in a strained or metaphorical sense, to that of other living things.[6] But the _ideas_ we a.s.sociate with the word are clearly developed in Greek philosophy and the foundations of biology are of great antiquity.