Page:Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society - Volume 1.djvu/155



the objects of Natural History, which attracted the attention, and excited the wonder of the followers of Alexander the Great, when that illustrious conqueror carried his victorious arms across the Indus, was the , or. It is well known that that extraordinary man, whose talents, as well as achievements, have certainly no parallel in history, was generally imbued with a love of science, and, as Pliny expresses it, inflamed with a passion for Natural History. To his great preceptor,, he had delegated the care of digesting, and elucidating, the vast materials that were collected, in the king’s progress through a quarter of the globe, which, to the inhabitants of Europe, was absolutely a new world. It is to be presumed that, by the orders of Alexander, not only specimens of natural productions were looked for, but that observations were also made, on the spot, by competent persons, on such objects as could not be removed. Both the one and the other were placed at the disposal of Aristotle, who by dint of his powerful mind, and with the assistance of an immense fund of knowledge, brought the rude materials, furnished to him, into a system of scientific arrangement. According to Pliny, as