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In this one short but pregnant chapter of Aristotle's there is far more than we can hope even to epitomize. He has much to say in it of 'classification', an important matter indeed, and he discusses it as a great logician should, in all its rigour. Many commentators have sought for Aristotle's 'classification of animals'; for my part I have never found it, and, in our sense of the word, I am certain it is not there. An unbending, unchanging classification of animals would have been something foreign to all his logic; it is all very well, it becomes practically necessary, when we have to arrange our animals on the shelves of a museum or in the arid pages of a 'systematic' catalogue; and it takes a new complexion when, or if, we can attain to a real or historical classification, following lines of actual descent and based on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it seems to me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions either of a complete scala naturae or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, at another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into the wild and the tame, the social and the solitary, and so on in endless ways besides. At the same time he had a quick eye for the great natural groups, such 'genera' (as he called them) as Fish or Bird, Insect or Mollusc. So it comes to pass that, while he fashioned no hard and fast scheme of classification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have thought it vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or temporary classifications come together after all, though in a somewhat hazy pattern, yet in a very beautiful and coherent parti-coloured web. And though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the characteristic which Molière hits upon in Les Femmes savantes,--'Je m'attache pour l'ordre au péripatétisme'.

Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he indicates that there are more ways than one of relating, or classifying, our facts; that, for instance, it may be equally proper and necessary to deal now with the animals and their several parts or properties, and at another time with the parts or properties as such, explaining and illustrating them in turn by the several animals which display or possess them. The 'Parts of Animals' is, then, a corollary, a necessary corollary, to the more anecdotal Historia Animalium. And yet again, there is a third alternative—to discuss the great functions or actions or potentialities of the organism, as it were first of all in the abstract, and then to correlate them with the parts which in this or that creature are provided and are 'designed' to effect them. This involves the conception and the writing of separate physiological treatises on such themes as Respiration, Locomotion, on Sleeping and Waking, and lastly (and in some respects the most ambitious, most erudite, and most astonishing of them all) the great account of the Generation of Animals.

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