Excerpt from Ancient Classic for English ReadersMacedonia would conquer the East, and become the mistress of the entire liberties of Greece.But there is one significant tradition about Aristotle which suggests circumstances likely to have produced in early life a considerable in¿uence upon his habits and pursuits. His father is said to have been an Asclepiad, - that is, he belonged to that distinguished caste who claimed to be the descendants of Esculapius. Now we have it, on the authority of Galen, * that it was the custom in Asclepiad families for the boys to be trained by their father in the practice of dissection, just as regularly as boys in other families learn to read and write. If Aristotle had really been trained from boyhood in the manner thus described, we can under stand how great an impulse he would have received to those physiological researches which formed so import ant a part of his subsequent achievements. But in one place of his writings On the Parts of Animals, ' I. V. He speaks of the extreme repugnance with which one necessarily sees veins, and ¿esh, and other suchlike parts, in the human subject. This does not Show the hardihood of a practised dissector. But Aristotle's youthful dissections, if made at all, were doubtless made on the lower animals. At all events, we may perhaps safely conclude about him, that he received from his father an hereditary tendency towards physiological study. But in addition to this tendency, Aristotle must doubtless have early manifested terest in, and capacity for, abstract philosophy.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.