the person who has struck him. But when any one misses hitting him and only annoys him, if in his rush he succeeds in catching that person, he does not harm him nor wound him with his claws, but shakes and frightens him and then leaves him. Lions are more disposed to enter towns and attack mankind when they have grown old, because old age renders them unable to hunt, and because of the decay of their teeth. They live many years; and in the case of a lame lion who was captured, he had many of his teeth worn down, which some considered a sign that lions live long, for this could not have happened to an animal who was not aged.”
The ‘Researches about Animals,’ like many other of Aristotle’s great treatises, appears to have been left in an unfinished state. The tenth book seems merely to be a sort of fragmentary continuation of the seventh book—both treating of the reproduction of the human species. In the ten books as they have come down to us, no one can pretend to find a finished whole. It is a question, therefore, whether the work was ever published in Aristotle’s lifetime, or whether it ever got, in its present form, to the Alexandrian Library. In the Alexandrian Catalogue, indeed, there is mention of a work entitled ‘Animals’ in nine books. But this may have been a set of excerpts by some Peripatetic scholar; we cannot tell what its exact relation to “Our Aristotle” may have been. There is some little interest in the question, on account of the influence that Aristotle is supposed to have exercised on the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, which was begun at Alexandria 285 b.c.—that is to say, just after Aristotle’s
