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, pe?? f?se??: 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, t? ape????—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, 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. 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 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 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. 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’. 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 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 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 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 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 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?? ????? ‘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 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 ??? e?te?a, a word which we translate, literally, the ‘guts of the earth’, and which commentators interpret as ‘earthworms’! But in Sicilian Doric, ??? e?te?a would at once become ?a? e?te?a; and between ‘Gasentera’ and the modern Sicilian ‘Casentula’ there is scarce a hairbreadth’s 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 ?????s??p??, 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???, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he indicates that there are more ways than one of 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 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. 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. 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 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. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson. |