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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| History of Animals | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Animals | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:49:27.075544+00:00 | kb-cron |
The History of Animals contains a large number of eye-witness observations, in particular of marine biology, in sharp contrast to Plato's "symbolic zoology". Aristotle's style and precision can be seen in the passage where he discusses the behaviour and anatomy of the cephalopods, mentioning the use of ink against predators, camouflage, and signalling. This is D'Arcy Thompson's translation:
Of molluscs the sepia is the most cunning, and is the only species that employs its dark liquid for the sake of concealment as well as from fear: the octopus and calamary make the discharge solely from fear. These creatures never discharge the pigment in its entirety; and after a discharge the pigment accumulates again. The sepia, as has been said, often uses its colouring pigment for concealment; it shows itself in front of the pigment and then retreats back into it; it also hunts with its long tentacles not only little fishes, but oftentimes even mullets. The octopus is a stupid creature, for it will approach a man's hand if it be lowered in the water; but it is neat and thrifty in its habits: that is, it lays up stores in its nest, and, after eating up all that is eatable, it ejects the shells and sheaths of crabs and shell-fish, and the skeletons of little fishes. It seeks its prey by so changing its colour as to render it like the colour of the stones adjacent to it; it does so also when alarmed. His observations were almost all accurate, according to the philosopher Anthony Preus, though Mario Vegetti argues that Aristotle sometimes let theory cloud observation.
Some of Aristotle's observations were not taken seriously by science until they were independently rediscovered in the 19th century. For example, he recorded that male octopuses have a hectocotylus, a tentacle which stores sperm and which can transfer it into the female's body; sometimes it snaps off during mating. The account was dismissed as fanciful until the French naturalist Georges Cuvier described it in his 1817 Le Règne Animal. Aristotle also noted that the young of the dogfish grow inside their mother's body attached by a cord to something like a placenta (a yolk sac). This was confirmed in 1842 by the German zoologist Johannes Peter Müller. Aristotle noted, too, that a river catfish which he called the glanis cares for its young, as the female leaves after giving birth; the male guards the eggs for forty or fifty days, chasing off small fish which threaten the eggs, and making a murmuring noise. The Swiss American zoologist Louis Agassiz found the account to be correct in 1890. Aristotle's methods of observation included dissection (Aristotle's lost companion work, The Dissections, contained illustrations of these), so he observed animal anatomy directly, though his interpretations of the functions of the structures he observed were subject to error. Like other classical authors such as Pliny the Elder, Aristotle also gathered evidence from travellers and people with specialised knowledge, such as fishermen and beekeepers, without much attempt to corroborate what they said.
=== Apparent errors ===
The text contains some claims that appear to be errors. Aristotle asserted in book II that female humans, sheep, goats, and swine have a smaller number of teeth than the males. This apparently false claim could have been a genuine observation, if as Robert Mayhew suggests women at that time had a poorer diet than men; some studies have found that wisdom teeth erupt in men more often than women after age 25. But the claim is not true of other species either. Thus, Philippa Lang argues, Aristotle may have been empirical, but he was quite laissez-faire about observation, "because [he] was not expecting nature to be misleading". In other cases, errors may have been wrongly attributed to Aristotle. Katrin Weigmann wrote "[Aristotle's] statement that flies have four legs was repeated in natural history texts for more than a thousand years despite the fact that a little counting would have proven otherwise." However, the historian and philosopher of biology John S. Wilkins notes that Aristotle did not say "all flies have four legs"; he wrote that one particular animal, the ephemeron or mayfly, "moves with four feet and four wings: and, I may observe in passing, this creature is exceptional not only in regard to the duration of its existence, whence it receives its name, but also because though a quadruped it has wings also." Mayflies do in fact walk on four legs, the front pair not being adapted for walking, so, Wilkins concludes, Aristotle was correct. More generally, Aristotle's biology, described across the five books sometimes called On Animals and some of his minor works, the Parva Naturalia, defines what in modern terms is a set of models of metabolism, temperature regulation, information processing, inheritance, and embryogenesis. All of these are wrong in the sense that modern science has replaced them with different models, but they were scientific in that they attempted to explain observed phenomena, proposed mechanisms, and made testable predictions.
=== Translations ===
The Arabic translation comprises treatises 1–10 of the Kitāb al-Hayawān (The Book of Animals). It was known to the Arab philosopher Al-Kindī (d. 850) and commented on by Avicenna among others. It was in turn translated into Latin, along with Ibn Rushd (Averroes)'s commentary on it, by Michael Scot in the early 13th century. English translations were made by Richard Cresswell in 1862 and by the zoologist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson in 1910. A French translation was made by Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire in 1883. Another translation into French was made by J. Tricot in 1957, following D'Arcy Thompson's interpretation. A German translation of books I–VIII was made by Anton Karsch, starting in 1866. A translation of all ten books into German was made by Paul Gohlke in 1949.
== Influence ==