COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

566 COSMOS.
influence exercised by nature on the civilisation and mental
development of mankind. It must, however, be admitted that
his points of connection are seldom felicitously chosen (as, for
instance, in VII. 24-47; XXV. 2; XXVI. 1; XXXV. 2;
XXXVI. 2-4; XXXVII. 1). Thus the consideration of the
nature of mineral and vegetable substances leads to the introduction
of a fragment of the history of the plastic arts, but
this brief notice has become more important in the present
state of our knowledge than all that we can gather regarding
descriptive natural history from the rest of the work.
The style of Pliny evinces more spirit and animation than
true dignity, and it is seldom that his descriptions possess any
degree of pictorial distinctness. We feel that the author has
drawn his impressions from books and not from nature, however
freely it may have been presented to him in the different
and sombre
regions of the earth which he visited. A grave
tone of colour pervades the whole composition, and this sentimental
feeling is tinged with a touch of bitterness whenever
he enters upon the consideration of the conditions of man and
his destiny. On these occasions, almost as in the writings of
Cicero, although with less simplicity of diction,* the aspect
of the grand unity of nature is adduced as productive of
encouragement and consolation to man.
The conclusion of the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the greatest
Roman memorial transmitted to the literature of the middle
ages is composed in a true spirit of cosmical description. It
contains, in the condition in which we have possessed it since
1831,f a brief consideration of the comparative natural history
of countries in different zones, an eulogium of Southern
Europe between the Mediterranean and the chain of the Alps,
and a description in praise of the Hesperian sky, " where the
temperate and gentle mildness of the climate had," according
to a dogma of the older Pythagoreans, " early hastened the
liberation of mankind from barbarism.''
* " Est enim animorum ingeniorumque naturale quoddam quasi
pabulum consideratio contempiatioque naturae. Erigimur, elatiores
fieri videmur, humana despicimus, cogitantesque supera atque coelestia
haec nostra, ut exigua et minima, contemnimus." (Cic., Acad., ii. 41.)
^ t Plin., xxxvii. 13 (ed. Sillig., t. v. 1836, p. 320). All earlier editions
closed with the words " Hispaniam quacunque ambitur mari."
The conclusion of the work was discovered in 1831, in a Bamberg
Codex, by Herr Ludwig v. Jan, Professor at Schweinfurt.