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Aristotle's many pages on fishes are delightful reading. The anatomist may read of such recondite matters as the placenta vitellina of the smooth dog-fish, whereby the viviparous embryo is nourished within the womb, after a fashion analogous to that of mammalian embryology—a phenomenon brought to light anew by Johannes Müller, and which excited him to enthusiastic admiration of Aristotle's minute and faithful anatomy. Again we may read of the periodic migration of the tunnies, of the great net or 'madrague' in which they are captured, and of the watchmen, the θυννοσκοποι {thynnoskopoi}, the 'hooers' of our ancient Cornish fishery, who give warning from tower or headland of the approaching shoal. The student may learn what manner of fish it was (the great Eagle-ray) with whose barbed fin-spine—most primitive of spear-heads—Ulysses was slain; and again, he may learn not a little about that ναρκη {narkê}, or torpedo, to which Meno compared his master Socrates, in a somewhat ambiguous compliment.

In rambling fashion Aristotle has a deal to tell us about insects, and he has left us a sort of treatise on the whole natural history of the bee. He knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells us many curious things about the economy of the hive and the arts of the bee-keeper, some of which things have a very modern and familiar look about them: for instance, the use of a net or screen to keep out the drones, a net so nicely contrived that these sturdy fellows are just kept out, while the leaner, slenderer workers are just let in. But it would be a long, long story to tell of Aristotle's knowledge of the bee, and to compare it with what is, haply, the still deeper skill and learning of that master of bee-craft, Virgil.

Then, having perfect freedom to go whithersoever we chose and to follow the bees across the boundless fields of ancient literature, we might read of the wild bees and of their honey out of a rock, and of the hive-bees too, in Homer; follow them to their first legendary home in Crete, where the infant Jupiter was fed on honey—as a baby's lips are touched with it even unto this day; trace their association with Proserpine and her mother, or their subtler connexion with Ephesian Diana; find in the poets, from Hesiod to the later Anthology, a hundred sweet references—to the bee-tree in the oak-wood, to the flowery hill Hymettus. Perhaps, at last, we might even happen on the place where Origen seems so strangely to foreshadow Shakespeare—speaking of the king of the bees with his retinue of courtiers (his officers of sorts), the relays of workmen (the poor mechanic porters crowding in), the punishment of the idle (where some, like magistrates, correct at home), the wars, the vanquished, and the plunder (which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their Emperor).

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