Aristoteles was born at Stageira, in the year 384 B.C., and it is interesting to note that his wonderful love of nature was fostered by, and, indeed, probably arose from the profession of his father. His father was the physician and friend of Amyntas, King of Macedonia, and his mother was a descendant of the great physician Æsculapius. The young Aristoteles lost both his parents at an early period of his life, but the son of Amyntas, called Philip, was his friend, and kind people brought the boy up. We know nothing of the boy’s habits or method of life; but it can be readily understood by those who read these lives, and have had a love of nature, before the experience of such a calamity as the loss of parents, that many an hour of sorrow was shortened and solaced by studying the graceful and blooming plants and the movements and habits of animals. Certain it is that the boy loved study, and it soon became evident that his loss was compensated, as it is very often in such cases, by a spirit of self-reliance. In his eighteenth year he went to Athens to study the healing art. When Aristoteles was about twenty-one years of age, the philosopher Plato returned from Sicily, and the young man then seems to have cared more for the study of the sciences which were requisite for a polished physician, than for the art of healing. He made his first self-sacrifice, as many a man has done since; he gave up the uncertainties of the art of curing diseases, and learned natural history and philosophy. His eagerness for knowledge and his extraordinary acuteness and sagacity doubtless attracted Plato’s notice, who soon called him “the intellect of the school,” and said his house was “the house of the reader.” As Aristoteles grew up, his early training and his love of the truth seen in nature, began to separate him from the common run of men, and his self-reliance began to make him an antagonist to the teachings even of the great Plato. But this opposition was not that of a vain and conceited young man. Plato had noticed his ability, and he was really a man of mark, whose opinions were valuable. Aristoteles studied facts, and knew many truths about natural history, but his wonderful master cared more for ideas. Such men must always clash, and Aristoteles writes in one of his books about his opposition to the philosophy of Plato, that it is painful to refute the doctrine of ideas, as it has been introduced by persons who were his friends; “nevertheless it is a duty to disregard such private feelings, for both philosophers and truth are dear to me, but it is right to give the preference to truth.” Truth! what is truth? said Pilate, and turned from the true. The Creator’s light, seen with our longing eyes, precious beyond conception, the sweetest solace of intellect; what is, what was—yet not to be defined by finite man. The very root of science, it is that which we are to hold in our consciences against all opposition. Appreciated by the savage, dear