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 sight, ignored, and forgotten. For the moment it seemed as if the favourite dictum of Lord Bacon had come to pass—that “Time, like a river, bringing down to us things which are lighter and more inflated, lets what is more weighty and solid sink.” But the result of that concatenation of accidents which we have narrated, was completely to reverse this sentence; so that now it may be said that all the lighter part of Aristotle’s work has been swept away by the stream of Time, while only that which was weighty and solid has been suffered to remain in existence. Owing to the wealth of the Roman empire, it is likely that numerous copies were made of the entire works of Aristotle, as edited by Andronicus—both for public libraries and for individuals. This gave him a better chance of survival in a collective form during the wreck and destruction of the barbarian invasions; and afterwards he was early taken into the protection of the Church. The dialogues, in the meantime, and other shorter productions, which had figured in the Alexandrian catalogue, had no coherence with each other, and thus were not reproduced by the copyists and librarians, as a whole. Again, they did not attract, as the greater works of Aristotle did, the attention of successive scholiasts and commentators. In short, they fell into the neglect which, comparatively speaking, they deserved, and disappeared, all but a few scattered quotations. But now we can thank the Providence of history that we possess a large portion of the best of all that Aristotle thought and wrote. We possess it, indeed, incomplete as he left it, and not only so, but