But there are names in the history of Science which
recall so imposing a combination of these several gifts, that,
comparing the men who bore them with the civilization of their time,
we can hardly conceive that uninspired intellect should come nearer
the imaginary standard. Such a man was Aristotle. The slender and
close-shaven fop, with the showy mantle on his ungraceful person and
the costly rings on his fingers, who hung on the lips of Plato for
twenty years, and trained the boy of Macedon to whatever wisdom he
possessed,--whose life was set by destiny between the greatest of
thinkers and the greatest of conquerors,--seems to have borrowed the
intellect of the one and the universal aspirations of the other. But
because he invaded every realm of knowledge, it must not be thought
he dealt with Nature at second-hand. He was a collector and a
dissector. He could display the anatomical structure of a fish as
well as write a treatise on the universe or on rhetoric, or
government or logic, or music or mathematics. Dethroned we call him;
and yet Mr. Agassiz quotes his descriptions with respect, and
confesses that the systematic classification of animals makes but
one stride from Aristotle to Linnaeus.
Cuvier was such a man. Alone, and unapproached in his own spheres of
knowledge, his "Report on the Progress of the Natural Sciences" is
only an index to the wide range of his intellect.
Pages:
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213