Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης 384-322 BCE) was an Ancient Greek philosopher. In our collection is a copy of his “Complete works (Opera Omnia)”, comprising of chapters devoted to the study of animals. (The history of animals, Movement of Animals, and Parts of animals). The work is in Greek with a Latin introduction.
The work is digitised and is available on this link: https://archive.org/details/b21364370/page/n3/mode/2up
Aristotle used his own observations, statements of those with specialist knowledge such as beekeepers and fishermen, and less accurate accounts from travellers to form the basis of his work.
Some of his observations, such as the form of the heron being related to its function, in terms of feeding for example, hint at the later concept of evolution.
His techniques were mostly those of observation and inference rather than experimentation, and he was one of the first to come up with a classification of living things, the Scala naturae
Among the characteristics or facets of this system were “group”, “legs”, “blood”, “souls” and “qualities”. Some of these correspond to later ideas – “group” being similar to concepts of vertebrate / invertebrate and the concept of species. “Souls” is a more subjective concept whereby every organism can have up to three types : “rational”, “sensitive” or “vegetative”. “Qualities” is perhaps closest to the concept of physical properties, and breaks down to “hot, cold, wet, dry” – again each living creature can exhibit a number of these qualities in Aristotle’s world.
