other accidents which might have prevented these writings from getting into the appreciative and competent hands of Tyrannion and Andronicus, would in all probability have made them as if they had never been. And thus that which was actually the chief intellectual food of men in the middle ages would have been withheld. Whether for better or worse, men’s thoughts would have had a different exercise and taken a different direction. Much of ecclesiastical history would have been changed. And many of the modes in which we habitually think and speak at the present day would have been different from what they are.
But we must return to the Alexandrian catalogue. If the MSS of all Aristotle’s most important works were carried off in the year 287 b.c., to be buried in Asia Minor for a century and a half, what means this list of 146 books bearing the name of Aristotle, which in 220 b.c. were stored up in the Alexandrian Library? Were these also all really written by Aristotle? Was he so voluminous a composer, as this would imply, as well as a profound thinker and an original explorer of nature in many departments? Or were the books supplied to the Alexandrian collection, as the works of Aristotle, mere forgeries, got up for the market, to supply the place of the genuine writings, which for the time had been lost to the world? The only answer that can be given to these questions must be a conjectural one, and probability seems to dictate an answer lying between the two extreme hypotheses. Several of the names appearing in the catalogue remind us of the
