"All my mortal life I have tried, by reading, by making vast collections of natural objects and animals, and by the closest thinking on the facts furnished to me by men of all sorts of professions and crafts, to get at some unity of knowledge. I held, and still hold, that just as Nature is one, so ought Knowledge too to be. I have written a very large number of treatises, many of which, thanks to Thy Providence, O Zeus, have escaped the smallpox called commentaries, in that the little ones never got possession of those works. But while always loving detail and single facts, I never lost sight of the connection of facts. As a coin, whether a penny or a sovereign, has no currency unless the image of the prince is cut out on it, even so has no fact scientific value unless the image of an underlying general principle is grafted thereon. This great truth I taught all my pupils, and I hoped that men would carefully observe it in all their studies. When then I went amongst the little ones, I expected them to do as I had taught their teachers to do. However, what I found was, O Zeus, the funniest of all things. "On my visit to what they call Universities I happened to call, in the first place, on a professor who said he studied history. In my time I believed that history was not as suggestive of philosophical truths as is poetry. Since then I have somewhat altered my view. Naturally enough I was curious to know what my Professor of History thought of that, and I asked him to that effect. He looked at me with a singular smile and said: 'My young friend (--I had assumed the appearance of a student--), my young friend, history is neither more nor less than a science. As such it consists of a long array of specialities.' 'And which,' I asked timidly, 'is your special period?' Whereupon the professor gravely said: 'The afternoons of the year 1234 A.D.'" While everybody present in the Assembly, including even St Francis of Assisi, laughed at this point of Aristotle's narrative, Diogenes exclaimed: "Why has the good man not selected the nights of that year? It would greatly reduce his labours." A peal of laughter rewarded the lively remark. Aristotle resumed his tale, and said: "When the professor saw that I was a little amused at his statement, he frowned on me and exclaimed in a deep voice, if with frequent stammerings, which as I subsequently learnt is the chief attraction of their diction, 'My young friend, you must learn to understand that we modern historians have discovered a method so subtle, and so effective, that, with all deference be it said, we are in some respects stronger even than the gods. For the gods cannot change the past; but we modern historians can. We do it every day of our lives, and some of us have obtained a very remarkable skill at it.'"