The first indications of attention to natural history are contained in the Old Testament. The interest which it excited in the mind of +Solomon+, evinces how highly it was esteemed in his time. The records of its first progression are however entirely lost, and no regular history of this science exists prior to the days of +Aristotle+, who under the auspices and through the munificence of his pupil Alexander the Great, was enabled to prosecute with the greatest advantage, for the time in which he lived, his experiments and inquiries into every department of natural history. Alexander felt so strong a desire to promote this object, that he placed at the disposal of Aristotle a very large sum of money, and in his Asiatic expedition employed above a thousand persons in collecting and transmitting to him specimens from every part of the animal kingdom. +Aristotle+ is therefore to be regarded as having laid the first foundation of our knowledge of that kingdom. He must likewise have derived great advantages from the discoveries and observations of preceding writers, to whose works he would probably have easy access. No individual naturalist could, without such assistance, have produced so valuable and extensive a work on natural science as that which Aristotle has bequeathed to posterity. And though the opinions of himself and his contemporaries have been transmitted to us in an imperfect manner, and abound in errors, still he and his editor +Theophrastus+ may be regarded as the only philosophical naturalists of antiquity, whose labours and discoveries present us with any portion of satisfactory knowledge. The observations of Aristotle on the subject of the honey-bee were afterwards "embellished and invested with a species of divinity, by the matchless pen of +Virgil+," in his fourth Georgic; and it excites feelings of regret, that poetry which for its beauty and elegance is so universally admired, should be the vehicle of opinions that are founded in error. +Aristomachus+ of Soli in Cilicia had his contemplations for nearly sixty years almost solely occupied by bees; and +Philiscus+ the Thracian spent a great portion of his time in the woods, that he might investigate their manners and habits without interruption; whence he acquired the name of _Agrius_. However small their contribution of knowledge may appear to this enlightened age, these ancient worthies must have aided the early progress of their favourite science, and are at all events evidences of the zeal with which it was prosecuted in their day. About the commencement of the Christian æra, +Columella+, who was a very accurate observer and exhibited considerable genius as a naturalist, made some curious and useful remarks upon bees in his Treatise _De Re Rusticá_: but Columella, like Virgil, appears to have acquiesced in and copied the errors of his predecessors.