History of Animals

Summary

The History of Animals (Greek Historia peri ta zoa, often translated 'Inquiry into Animals') is the largest of Aristotle's biological works and the foundation of zoology as a discipline. The Greek word historia means inquiry or a collected account of facts, not history in the sense of a narrative of the past, and Aristotle's aim here is to record the differences among animals in their parts, their ways of life, their activities and their characters, so that their causes can be explained in companion treatises such as Parts of Animals and Generation of Animals. More than five hundred kinds of animals appear, from sponges, sea anemones and cuttlefish to the elephant, the camel and the human being, with special attention to the fish and shellfish of the Aegean. Book I sets out the ways animals differ (in habitat, food, mode of life and temperament) and then, because a man is best known to us, describes the human body part by part as a standard of comparison. Book II surveys the external and internal parts of blooded animals, with notes on the ape, the elephant and the chameleon. Book III treats the generative organs, quotes the physicians Syennesis of Cyprus, Diogenes of Apollonia and Polybus on the course of the blood vessels before giving Aristotle's own account, and describes bone, sinew, fat, blood and milk. Book IV turns to the bloodless animals (cephalopods, crustaceans, shellfish and insects) and to senses, voice and sleep, observing that horses, dogs and other quadrupeds appear to dream. Books V and VI describe reproduction in insects, fish, birds and mammals, including the day-by-day development of the chick in the egg, in which the heart first appears as a pulsing red spot. Book VII, with frank detail, covers human conception, pregnancy, childbirth and infancy. Books VIII and IX, in Cresswell's order, describe how animals feed, migrate, hibernate and fall ill, their friendships and enmities, and their apparent traces of character and intelligence, ending with bees. Book X, on human sterility, is generally regarded as not by Aristotle. The work mixes Aristotle's own observation and dissection with reports from fishermen, hunters, beekeepers and earlier writers, and he often marks which reports he doubts. Some descriptions long dismissed as fables were confirmed in the nineteenth century, notably his account of the smooth dogfish nourishing its young through a placenta-like attachment and the specialised mating arm of the male octopus. Other claims, such as that men have more teeth than women and that the back of the skull is empty, are plain errors. The book rewards students who want to see how close attention to living things begins, and it invites them to receive creatures as part of an ordered, intelligible world worth knowing.

Plot or Argument

• Book I: how animals differ, and the human body as standard

  Aristotle distinguishes uniform parts (flesh, bone) from composite ones (hand, face) and sorts animals by habitat, food, gregariousness and temperament, observing that only human beings deliberate and recollect (Ch. I). Because a man is best known to us, he then describes the human head, face, trunk and internal organs (Ch. VI onward), including the mistaken claim that the back of the skull is empty.

• Book II: the parts of blooded animals

  A comparative survey of limbs, teeth, horns, hair and internal organs across viviparous and oviparous quadrupeds, fish, serpents and birds, with special notes on the ape, elephant and chameleon and on the different stomachs of ruminants.

• Book III: generative organs, blood vessels and tissues

  After the reproductive organs, Aristotle quotes Syennesis, Diogenes of Apollonia and Polybus on the veins (Ch. II-III), criticises their method of inferring the vessels from emaciated bodies, and gives his own account from the heart outward. He then treats sinew, bone, marrow, cartilage, hair, membrane, flesh, fat, blood, milk and semen.

• Book IV: bloodless animals, senses and sleep

  Cephalopods, crustaceans, testaceans, sea urchins, sea squirts and insects are described part by part (Ch. I-VII). The book then compares the senses across animals, discusses voice and sound in fish and birds, and observes sleep and dreaming in animals and children (Ch. VIII-X), ending with differences between the sexes.

• Books V-VI: reproduction across the animal kingdom

  Book V treats spontaneous generation (as Aristotle believed it occurred) and sexual reproduction in shellfish, crustaceans, cephalopods and insects, closing with bees. Book VI follows birds, fish and mammals, describing the chick's development in the egg day by day (Ch. III), the live-bearing selachians, and the breeding seasons and gestation of quadrupeds.

• Book VII: human generation from conception to infancy

  Puberty, menstruation, signs of conception, the course of pregnancy, twins, the pains of labour, the midwife's care in cutting the umbilical cord (Ch. IX), nursing, and the convulsions that threaten infants, with the book breaking off abruptly.

• Books VIII-X: ways of life, character and a spurious appendix

  Book VIII opens with the gradual scale of nature from lifeless things through plants to animals and treats food, migration, hibernation, the effects of climate, and the diseases of pigs, dogs, horses and elephants (Ch. XXI-XXVI). Book IX describes enmities, friendships and the ingenuity of animals, ending with bees and wasps. Book X, on causes of sterility in women and men, is generally judged not to be Aristotle's.

Characters

• Syennesis of Cyprus, cited physician

  An otherwise little-known physician whose account of the great blood vessels Aristotle quotes in Book III, Ch. II.

• Diogenes of Apollonia, cited natural philosopher

  Fifth-century thinker whose detailed description of the veins in man is quoted at length in Book III.

• Polybus, cited physician

  Hippocratic writer, traditionally Hippocrates' son-in-law, whose four pairs of veins Aristotle reports in Book III.

• Fishermen, hunters and beekeepers, informants

  Practical observers whose reports Aristotle records and weighs, sometimes accepting them, sometimes marking them as doubtful.

• Herodotus and Ctesias, cited writers

  Earlier writers whose animal stories Aristotle occasionally corrects or treats with caution.

Lessons

• Inquiry begins with collecting differences

  Historia means an organised gathering of facts. Aristotle insists on first establishing what is the case about animals, their parts and habits, before explaining why, and he keeps that task separate from his causal treatises. Students learn that careful description is not inferior to theory but its necessary foundation.

  • Why does Aristotle collect differences among animals before seeking their causes?
  • How does he decide which reports from fishermen or earlier writers to trust?
  • What would a modern field notebook share with the History of Animals, and what would it add?

• Starting from the creature we know best

  In Book I Aristotle begins with the human body because, as with a familiar currency, the best known serves as the measure for the rest. Yet he places human beings within the animal kingdom while singling them out as the only animals capable of deliberation and recollection. The book thus affirms both our kinship with other creatures and our distinctness from them.

  • What reason does Aristotle give for describing the human body first?
  • Which capacities does he say belong to human beings alone?
  • How does Genesis 1-2 describe both the kinship and the distinctness of man among the creatures?

• Watching the chick's heart begin

  Book VI, Ch. III describes, from opened eggs, the heart appearing on about the third day as a red spot that palpitates as if alive, then the vessels, eyes and body taking shape. The passage shows patient, repeated observation of development, and it grounded Aristotle's conviction that the heart is the first part to live. Harvey would return to the same egg two thousand years later.

  • What sequence of development does Aristotle record in the hen's egg?
  • What would he have needed to do to see these stages, and how often?
  • Why might the first appearance of the heart have impressed him so deeply?

• Honest records include honest mistakes

  Some of Aristotle's reports long mocked as fables, such as the placental dogfish and the octopus's mating arm, were vindicated, while other confident claims, such as men having more teeth than women, were simply wrong. Reading both kinds side by side teaches that accuracy depends on checking, and that a great observer still needs correction.

  • Find one claim in the text that Aristotle could easily have checked but did not. Why might he have missed it?
  • Why were some of his true observations disbelieved for centuries?
  • What habits would protect your own observations from both credulity and false confidence?

• Traces of character in animals

  Book VIII opens by noting that animals show traces of gentleness or ferocity, courage or cowardice, and that nature passes by small steps from lifeless things to plants and animals. Aristotle sees continuity without erasing the difference reason makes. The passage invites careful thought about how creatures resemble us and how they do not.

  • What does Aristotle mean by 'traces' of moral dispositions in animals?
  • How does his scale of nature differ from Darwin's account of common descent?
  • What responsibilities toward animals follow if they share some traits with us but not reason?

Context

The History of Animals is the descriptive base of Aristotle's biological project, which also includes Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, Movement of Animals and Progression of Animals. Its strong focus on marine life of the eastern Aegean, and place names around the lagoon of Pyrrha on Lesbos, have led scholars such as D'Arcy Thompson to connect much of the research with Aristotle's stay on Lesbos (c. 345-343 BC) with Theophrastus. It draws on earlier physicians, on Herodotus and Ctesias, and on practical knowledge from fishermen, farmers and hunters. The story that Alexander supplied animals from his conquests appears in Pliny but is generally doubted.

Composition

Composed and revised over many years, probably between Aristotle's time at Assos and Lesbos and his Lyceum period (c. 350-322 BC). Book X is usually judged spurious, and the order of Books VII-IX varies between editions. The library's text is Richard Cresswell's translation for Bohn's Classical Library (1862), based on Schneider's edition; book and chapter locators follow Cresswell's divisions, which are not always identical to the Bekker numbering used in modern editions.

Reception

Theophrastus extended the method to plants; Pliny the Elder mined the work for his Natural History. It passed into Arabic and into Latin through Michael Scot's thirteenth-century translation of the zoological books, and Albertus Magnus built his De animalibus upon it. Theodore Gaza's fifteenth-century Latin version spread it in the Renaissance, and Conrad Gessner and William Harvey drew on it. Darwin, sent William Ogle's translation of Parts of Animals in 1882, wrote that Linnaeus and Cuvier, his two intellectual heroes, were mere schoolboys compared with Aristotle. It was included in the Great Books of the Western World (2nd ed., 1990), volume 8.

Comparisons

• Parts of Animals

  Parts of Animals explains in terms of purpose and cause the structures the History of Animals only describes, and its first book defends the study of humble creatures because there is something marvellous in every part of nature.

• Generation of Animals

  Generation of Animals supplies the theory (form from the male, matter from the female, the heart formed first) behind the reproductive observations collected in Books V-VII of the History of Animals.

• On the Origin of Species

  Darwin, like Aristotle, built on vast collections of observed differences and reports from breeders and naturalists, but explained the gradation of living things by descent with modification where Aristotle saw a fixed scale of nature.

• The Natural History of Selborne

  Gilbert White's letters revive Aristotle's patient attention to local animals, their migrations and habits, and White argues with ancient claims about hibernating swallows that go back to Book VIII.

• On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (De Motu Cordis)

  Harvey, who called Aristotle his guide, returned to the chick embryo and the beating heart described in Book VI, and replaced the Aristotelian and Galenic accounts of the vessels with the circulation of the blood.

• Hippocratic Writings

  Polybus, quoted in Book III on the four pairs of veins, belongs to the Hippocratic tradition, and the Hippocratic treatises on women and on the nature of the child cover much of the ground of Book VII.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Medical relevance was raised from none to medium because the book itself contains extended human anatomy, quotations from early physicians on the blood vessels, a book on human conception, pregnancy, childbirth and infancy, observations on sleep and dreaming, and descriptions of animal diseases including canine lytta (usually identified with rabies). Aristotle had not dissected human bodies, and much of his human anatomy is inferred from animals or reports; his errors (an empty occiput, more teeth in men) are part of the historical record. Identifications of ancient diseases with modern ones are interpretive.

• Book I, Ch. VI-XVII

  Systematic description of the human body, head to foot and then internal organs, used as the standard for comparing other animals; includes the claim that the occiput is empty.

  Anatomy Dissection Ancient Medicine
• Book III, Ch. II-V

  Quotations from Syennesis of Cyprus, Diogenes of Apollonia and Polybus on the course of the veins, followed by Aristotle's own account centred on the heart and his description of sinews.

  Anatomy Dissection Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine
• Book IV, Ch. X

  Sleep and dreaming in animals; the claim that infants do not dream until about four or five, and that dreaming beginning late in life may precede illness or death.

  Sleep Insomnia Dreams Nightmares
• Book VII, Ch. II-XI

  Menstruation, signs of conception, pregnancy, labour pains, the midwife's management of the umbilical cord, nursing, and infant convulsions often fatal before the seventh day.

  Childbirth Maternal Nursing Caregiving Epilepsy Seizures
• Book VIII, Ch. XXI-XXVI

  Diseases of swine, dogs (including lytta, which induces madness and spreads by bites), horses, asses and elephants, with signs and some remedies.

  Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Choose one common animal near your home and keep an Aristotelian record for two weeks: its parts, food, habitat, behaviour and apparent temperament, marking which facts you observed yourself and which you were told.

• Essay

  Take one claim from the History of Animals that was later confirmed and one that proved false, and explain what difference method made in each case.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation on the shore at Pyrrha between Aristotle and a fisherman who insists he has seen a strange creature, in which Aristotle decides what to record and what to doubt.

Further Reading

• Parts of Animals, Aristotle

  The causal explanation of the structures described in the History of Animals.

• Generation of Animals, Aristotle

  Aristotle's theory of reproduction and embryonic development.

• The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, Armand Marie Leroi

  A biologist revisits Lesbos and the History of Animals, testing Aristotle's observations.

• Natural History, Books VIII-XI, Pliny the Elder

  The Roman zoological books that borrow heavily from Aristotle.

• Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology, James G. Lennox

  Essays on how the History of Animals fits Aristotle's scientific method.