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COMPOSES HIS ENCYCLOPÆDIA.

believe that all his great works were written at this time, we may conceive, with great likelihood, that all the “demonstrations” they contain had at one time the form of “teachings” — that is to say, that they went through the process of being read to his school. But there was another special way in which Aristotle was able not only to benefit his scholars, but also to make use of them as subordinate labourers in his work. We must remember what he was aiming at: it was to produce what we should call an encyclopædia of all the sciences. Such a book, nowadays, is done by many different hands, and the different articles in it do not aim at being original, but at compiling the latest results of the best authorities in each department. But Aristotle sought to construct an encyclopædia with his own hand, in which each science should appear brand-new, originally created or quite reconstructed by himself. He began from the very beginning, and framed his own philosophical or scientific nomenclature; he traced out the laws on which human reasoning proceeds, and was the first to reduce these to science, and to produce a Logic. He wrote anew ‘Metaphysics,’ ‘Ethics,’ ‘Politics,’ ‘Rhetoric,’ and ‘The Art of Poetry;’ and while these were still on the stocks, he was engaged in founding, on the largest scale, the physical and natural sciences, especially natural philosophy, physiology under various aspects (such as histology and anatomy, embryology, psychology, the philosophy of the senses, &c.), and, above all, natural history. Much of this work, especially its more abstract part, was the slowly-ripened fruit of his entire previous life. But