We have given the particulars of this division to show the almost pedantic love of system that Varro indulged. Nearly all his books were parcelled out on a similar methodical plan. He had no idea of following the natural divisions of a subject, but always imposed on his subject artificial categories drawn from his own prepossessions. [17] The remark has been made that of all Romans Varro was the most unphilosophical. Certainly if a true classification be the basis of a truly scientific treatment, Varro can lay no claim to it. His erudition, though, profound, is cumbrous. He never seems to move easily in it. His illustrations are far-fetched, often inopportune. What, for instance, can be more out of place than to bring to a close a discussion on farming by the sudden announcement of a hideous murder? [18] His style is as uncouth as his arrangement is unnatural. It abounds in constructions which cannot be justified by strict rules of syntax, _e.g._ "_hi qui pueros in ludum mittunt, idem barbatos ... non docebimus?_" [19] "When we send our children to school to learn to speak correctly, shall we not also correct bearded men, when they make mistakes?" Slipshod constructions like this occur throughout the treatise on the Latin tongue, though, it is true, they are almost entirely absent from that on husbandry, which is a much more finished work. Obscurity in explaining what the author means, or in describing what he has seen, is so frequent an accompaniment of vast erudition that it need excite little surprise. And yet how different it is from the matchless clearness of Cicero or Caesar! In the treatise on husbandry, Varro is at great pains to describe a magnificent aviary in his villa at Casinum, but his auditors must have been clear-headed indeed if they could follow his description. [20] And in the _De Lingua Latina_, wishing to show how the elephant was called _Luca bos_ from having been first seen in Lucania with the armies of Pyrrhus, and from the ox being the largest quadruped with which the Italians were then acquainted, he gives us the following involved note-- _In Virgilii commentario erat: Ab Lucanis Lucas; ab eo quod nostri, quom maximam quadrupedem, quam ipsi haberent, vocarent bovem, et in Lucanis Pyrrhi bello primum vidissent apud hostes elephantos, Lucanum bovem quod putabant Lucam bovem appellassent_.