The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and murmurs of "I told you so!" Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci, a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature in these men--the thing that differentiates them from other men--was the great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they saw was related to themselves--it came very close to them--they wanted to know more about it. This is essentially the child-mind, and the calamity of life is to lose it. Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was beautiful, of course--it brought in an income, made friends and brought him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could execute, and the soul that could see. And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his art is immortal.