COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

INFLUENCE OF THE BOMAN EMPIRE. 563
neous nature of substances, their chemical composition, and
their mutual affinities.
The only names which we can bring forward in connection
with the study of organic nature, are the anatomist Marinus,
Rufus of Ephesus who dissected apes and distinguished
tetween nerves of sensation and of motion, and Galen of
Pergainus, who eclipsed all others. The natural history of
animals by ^Elian of Praeneste, and the poem on fishes by
Oppianus of Cilicia,'contain scattered notices, but no facts based
on personal examination. It is impossible to comprehend how
the enormous multitudes of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses,
elks, lions, tigers, panthers, crocodiles, and ostriches,
which for upwards of four centuries were slain in the Roman
circus, should have failed to advance the knowledge of comparative
anatomy.* I have already noticed the merit of
Dioscorides in regard to the collection and study of plants,
and it only remains therefore to observe that his works exer-
cised the greatest influence on the botany and pharmaceutical
chemistry of the Arabs. The botanical garden of the Roman
physician Antonius Castor, who lived to be upwards of a hundred
years of age, was perhaps laid out in imitation of the
botanical gardens of Theophrastes and Mithridates, but it did
not in all probability lead to any further advancement in
science than did the collection of fossil bones formed by the
Emperor Augustus, or the museum of objects and products of
nature which has been ascribed on very slight foundation to
Apuleius of Madaura.f
The representation of the contributions made by the epoch of
the Roman dominion to cosmical knowledge, would be incom-
plete, were I to omit mentioning the great attempt made by
Caius Plinius Secundus to comprise a description of the uni-
verse in a work consisting of thirty-seven books. In the
* The ]S"umidian Metellus caused 142 elephants to be killed in the
circus. In the games which Pompey gave, 600 lions and 406 panthers
sacrificed 3500 wild beasts in the national
were assembled. Augustus
festivities, and a tender husband laments that he could not celebrate the
day of his wife's death by a sanguinary gladiatorial fight at Verona,
" because contrary winds had detained in port the panthers which had
"
in Africa ! (Plin., Epist., vi. 34.)
t See p. 557. Yet Apuleius, as Cuvier remarks (Hist, des Sciences
been bought
naturelles, t. i. p. 287), was the first to describe accurately the bony
hook in the second and third stomach of the Aplysice.
2 o2