Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/47

39] prevented him from comprehending. Perhaps, too, he derived some of his data directly from popular report and superstition. Certainly to us to-day his work seems a disorderly and indiscriminate conglomeration of fact and legend on all sorts of subjects—disorderly, in that its author does not seem to have made any effort to sift his material, to compare and arrange his facts, even in his own mind; indiscriminate, in that Pliny seems to lack any standard of judgment between the true and the false, and to deem almost nothing too improbable, silly or indelicate to be mentioned. Ought we to consider such a work as truly representative of the beliefs of preceding centuries, or as an example of the best educated thought and science of its author's own age? This is a question which we must consider.

Yet as we read Pliny's pages we feel that he possessed elements of greatness. If he was equipped with little scientific training or experience, we should remember that little training or experience was necessary to deal with the science of those days. At least he sacrificed his life in an effort to investigate natural phenomena. Moreover, his faults were probably to a great extent common to his age. The tendency to regard anything written as of at least some value did not begin with him. Material had often before been collected in a haphazard manner. Lewes, in his book on the science of Aristotle, has described with truth even the famous History of Animals as unclassified in arrangement and careless in the selection of material. Many of Pliny's marvelous assertions and absurd remedies purport to be from