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 CHAPTER II.

of the works of Aristotle has been handed down to us, which was made by the librarian of the great Library at Alexandria about the year 220 —that is to say, a century after the death of the philosopher—and which gives the titles of all the books, contained in the Library, which were attributed to the authorship of Aristotle. These titles amount to 146 in number, but it is at first sight a most astonishing circumstance that they do not in the least answer to the writings which we now possess under the name of the “works of Aristotle.” All the books mentioned in the Alexandrian catalogue are now lost; only a few fragments of them have been preserved in the shape of extracts and quotations from them made by other writers; but everything tends to show that they were quite a different set, and different altogether in character, from the forty treatises which stand collectively on our bookshelves labelled ‘Aristotelis Opera.’ Under the circumstances it would be natural to conjecture that so (comparatively speaking) short a time after the death of Aristotle, the learned keepers of the Alexandrian Library