eye be struck sparks are seen. Aristotle, however, says that this fact is to be explained in another way: the iris of the eye shines like a phosphorescent substance; when the eye is struck, the sudden shock of the blow causes the eye as an object of vision to become separate from the eye as the organ of vision, and thus the eye for an instant sees itself! Again, he says that the “white” of the eye is unctuous, which prevents the watery vehicle that conveys the sight from getting frozen; the eye is less liable to freeze than any part of the body!
Turning from these curiosities of an old-world physiology, let us glance at the natural history of Aristotle. There is something peculiar and Aristotelian about the very terms “Natural History.” They arise out of a mistranslation of the title of Aristotle’s work, “Histories about Animals,’ where “Histories” is used in its primitive sense of “investigations” or “researches.” But the title has been translated Historia Animalium, or ‘History of Animals,’ and from this the modem phrase “Natural History” has doubtless got crystallised into its present signification. Looking to the contents of the treatise in question, we perceive that to a great part of it the shorter form of the word “Histories” would have been applicable, as consisting rather of “Stories about Animals” than of any very profound investigations with regard to them. It is probable that a large proportion of what is here recorded came to Aristotle orally; and that, too, not from savants, but from uneducated classes of people whose occupations had put them in the way of observing the habits of
