ilosophic and aesthetic criticism. We hear, for example, of his life
of Plato; of Pythagoras (in which he laid emphasis on the philosopher's
practical work), of Xenophanes, and of the Seven Wise Men.

He also wrote _Lives of Poets_. We hear of books on Alcaeus and on
Homer, in which latter he is said to have made the startling remark that
the poems 'should be pronounced in the Aeolic dialect'. Whatever this
remark exactly meant, and we cannot tell without the context, it seems
an extraordinary anticipation of modern philological discoveries. He
wrote on the _Hypotheses_--i. e. the subject matter--_of Sophocles and
Euripides_; also on _Musical Contests_, +peri Mousikon agonon+, carrying
further Aristotle's own collection of the _Didascaliae_, or official
notices of the production of Tragedies in Athens. The book dealt both
with dates and with customs; it told how Skolia were sung, with a
laurel or myrtle twig in the hand, how Sophocles introduced a third
actor, and the like.

In philosophy proper he wrote On the Soul, +peri psyches+. His first
book, the _Corinthiacus_, proved that the Soul was a 'harmony' or 'right
blending' of the four elements, and was identical with the force of the
living body. The second, the _Lesbiacus_, drew the conclusion that, if a
compound, it was destructible. (Hence a great controversy with his
master.)

He wrote +peri phthoras anthropon+, on the _Perishing of Mankind_; i. e.
on the way in which large masses of men have perished off the earth,
through famine, pestilence, wild beasts, war, and the like. He decides
that man's most destructive enemy is Man. (The subject may have been
suggested to him by a fine imaginative passage in Aristotle's
_Meteorology_ (i. 14, 7) dealing with the vast changes that have taken
place on the earth's surface and the unrecorded perishings of races and
communities.)

He wrote a treatise against _Divination_, and a (satirical?) _Descent to
the Cave of Trophonius_. He seems, however, to have allowed some
importance to dreams and to the phenomena of 'possession'.

And, with all this, we have not touched on his greatest work, which was
in the sphere of geography. He wrote a +Periodos ges+, a _Journey Round
the Earth_, accompanied with a map. He used for this map the greatly
increased stores of knowledge gained by the Macedonian expeditions over
all Asia as far as the Ganges. He also seems to have devised the method
of denoting the position of a place by means of