On Animals (De Animalibus)

it does not touch it again; or the doves, which neither endure to mate with many, nor abandon the marriage bond once entered into from their very first beginning, unless widowed or celibate. But the discipline and education of the elephant—who would not find him more studious? There is absolutely no part of human life that does not most conveniently receive examples of its own duties from here. For to omit the liberal arts, which are themselves aided not a little by the natures of animals, from where, I ask, can examples of health be sought more conveniently than from animals? They are accustomed to change places according to the condition of the time; they eat or drink no more than is salubrious for them; they sleep no longer than the reason of health requires; they observe a measure in moving and resting. Each knows its own medicines; each lives content with its own lot and rejoices. These things are widely prescribed by physicians; but truly, examples, in which there is greater power than in precepts, are offered more reliably by animals. I add the utility that can be brought to the faculty of speaking from this study of animals; for those comparisons and assimilations which the Greeks call parables—which greatly adorn a discourse and hold the listener—can be taken from here in varied, copious, and most apt ways, so that whether you are speaking or sharing a common conversation with others, you may be eloquent, apt, and pleasant. And from where, pray, could a poet receive his rare and marvelous things more beautifully than from these books, which sift, explain, and open up the secrets of nature? Moreover, the physician, who confesses that he starts his work from where the philosopher ends, will nowhere see this more fully than here. And he will recognize what is handed down by Galen, the prince of physicians: that Aristotle was the first to write on anatomy—that is, the dissection of members—and he will perceive that the same man was both the first and the best authority. Now also the philosophers of our age, who receive the fourfold cause of things from that first institution of the books of Natural Auscultation [Physics]—indeed by a certain common reason, but who see little of how nature uses these in the constitution and generation of animals because they lack an Aristotelian exemplar that they could read—will one day rejoice to have seen this here, and they will, as they call themselves, act more worthily as physicists; for we seek universal reasons so that...