Post
I have read that Aristotle was the greatest naturalist of antiquity. Having finally read his Historia Animalium carefully, I find this is an understatement. He observed that animals with lungs breathe; that cetaceans are warmblooded; that bees have a social structure unlike other insects; that the embryo develops in stages. Two thousand years before me, he was asking the right questions. I wish he had had a better answer.
Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life, in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie. Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the plant. Of plants, one will differ from another as to its amount of apparent vitality; and, in a word, the whole genus of plants, whilst it is devoid of life as compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with other corporeal entities.
β Historia Animalium, Book VIII, Chapter 1 (c. 340 BC)β Letter to William Ogle, 22 February 1882
19th Century