Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/819

Rh male stag shedding his horns he writes, "It is said that the left horn has never yet been seen, for the animal hides it because it has some medical properties." "When stags are bitten by the phalangium or other such creature, they collect a number of crabs and eat them." These statements are made by Aristotle without a single hint that he does not believe them. Had he regarded them as fabulous, it is probable that he would have so intimated, as he is in the habit of doing when he regards stories as "unworthy of credit." Mr. Lewes mentions Cuvier's instancing four generalizations to prove the immense acquaintance Aristotle must have had with particulars, and adds: *' I will quote four others (forty might be found), all taken from the first book, which exemplify plainly enough how easily large and careful induction could be dispensed with: 1. The lion has no cervical vertebrae, but a single bone in its neck. 2. Long-lived persons have one or two lines which extend through the whole hand; short-lived persons have two lines, and these do not extend through the whole hand. 3. Man has, in proportion to his size, the largest and the moistest brain. 4. The forehead is large in stupid men, small in lively men, broad in men predisposed to insanity, and round in high-spirited men."

Aristotle's account of the halcyon, or kingfisher, is a curious mixture of fact and fiction, the latter largely predominating. He gives a good popular description of the bird, but says also: "Birds generally breed in the spring and the beginning of summer, but the kingfisher is an exception, for it produces its young about the time of the winter solstice; wherefore fine days which happen at this season are called halcyon days, seven days before the solstice and seven days after it, as Simonides has written, as when Jupiter in the winter month prepares fourteen days, which mortals call the windless season, the sacred nurse of the variegated halcyon. . . . These halcyon days do not always happen in this country at the season of the solstice, but they nearly always occur in the Sicilian Sea." He has some curious stories about eagles, and here, too, seems to depend upon the poets: "The eagle lays three eggs, but hatches only two, as is also related in the poems of Musæus, 'the bird which lays three eggs, hatches two and cares only for one.' Such things often occur, yet even three young ones have been seen in the nest. . . . The sea-eagle is very quick sighted, and compels its young ones while still naked to look at the sun, and if one of them will not do so it beats it and turns it round; and the young one which first weeps it kills, the other it rears."

Among other curious zoölogical statements of Aristotle's which seem to receive his support, and which may be set down as current folk-lore of his time, are the following: "If any one make a noise as grasshoppers fly along, they emit a kind of moisture, as agriculturists say. They feed on dew, and if a person advances to them bending his finger and then straightening it, they will remain more quiet than if the finger is put out straight at once, and will climb up the finger,