Indeed I have never found any evidence in the History of Animals which could lead us to suppose that Aristotle was acquainted with the animals of the interior of Asia and India, by information derived from the companions of Alexander; nor have I been able to find the slightest information from which I can form a conjecture as to either the place or time when this history was written: but, in order that others may institute a more rigorous inquiry into the date and place of its authorship, if any such have escaped my notice, I will place before my readers that portion of the Aristotelian chronology which relates to this work, from the disputation of St. Croix, a learned French author (Examen Critique des Historiens d'Alexander le Grand, p. 603, second edition). Aristotle, therefore, at the invitation of Philip, King of Macedon, undertook the education of his son, Alexander, when he was thirteen years of age, in the second year of the 109th Olympiad, when Phythodotus was Archon of Athens. Aristotle returned to Athens in the second year of the 111th Olympiad, in the Archonship of Evænetus. He taught at Athens for thirteen years, from whence he fled to Chalcis, and there he died, in the third year of the 114th Olympiad, during the Archonship of Philocles. There is, indeed, a passage in Pliny, (book x. ch. 64, sect. 84, on the fecundity of mice,) where he says, that among other things Aristotle has spoken in his History of Animals (vi. 29) of the gravid fœtus of the Persian mice; but the Greek exemplar contains no authority from which Pliny could have derived the words which he has added: "More wonderful than all is the fœtus of the mice, which we cannot unhesitatingly receive, though derived from the authority of Aristotle, and the soldiers of Alexander the Great." In this and in two other places he calls those _soldiers_ whom others are in the habit of calling the _companions_ of Alexander the Great. But there is also a passage in the Meteorics of Aristotle (iii. 1), where he mentions as a recent event the destruction of the temple of Ephesus, by the incendiary Herostratus, on the day of Alexander's birth, in these words: "As it has just now happened in the burning of the temple of Ephesus." This book, therefore, appears to have been written at the commencement of the 106th Olympiad, and with it the History of Animals is very closely connected, as I have shown in my treatise on the order of the books of Physics; so that we may suppose that they were written in nearly the same Olympiad, if we regard only the series of the works; and no interruption occurred with which we are unacquainted. On the other hand, in the Meteorics (iii. 5), he speaks of a lunar rainbow, and says that it is rarely seen, and then adds, "that it has occurred but twice in more than fifty years." If we reckon these fifty years from the birth of Aristotle, in the first year of the 99th Olympiad, that book will fall in the third or fourth year of the 111th Olympiad;