The Loeb classical library [Greek authors]

Life at the children's amusement park becomes a nightmare for twelve-year-old Joan when she tries to discover who is sabotaging the park's operation.

In History of Animals Aristotle analyzes "differences" -- in parts, activities, modes of life, and character -- across the animal kingdom, in preparation for establishing their causes, which are the concern of his other zoological works. Over 500 species of animals are considered: shellfish, insects, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals -- including human beings. In books I-IV Aristotle gives a comparative survey of internal and external body parts, including tissues and fluids and of sense faculties and voice. Books V-VI study reproductive methods, breeding habits, and embryogenesis as well as some secondary sex differences. In Books VII-IX, Aristotle examines differences among animals in feeding; in habitat, hibernation, migration; in enmities and sociability; in disposition (including differences related to gender) and intelligence. Here too he describes the human reproductive system, conception, pregnancy, and obstetrics. Book X establishes the female's contribution to generation. The Loeb edition of History of Animals is in three volumes. A full index to all ten books is included in Volume Three. D.M. Balme was, at the time of his death, Professor Emeritus of Classics, Queen Mary College, London; his edition of Books VII-X has been prepared for publication by Allan Gotthelf. Aristotle's biological corpus includes not only History of Animals, but also Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, Generation of Animals, and significant parts of On the Soul and Parva Naturalia. Aristotle's general methodology -- "first we must grasp the differences, then try to discover the causes" (HA 1.6) -- is applied to the study of plants by his younger co-worker and heir to his school, Theophrastus: Enquiry into Plants studies differences across the plant kingdom, while De Causis Plantarum studies their causes. In the later ancient world, both Pliny's Natural History and Aelian's On the Characteristics of Animals draw significantly on Aristotle's biological work. The only work by a classical author at all comparable to Aristotle's treatises on animals is Xenophon's On Horses (included in Volume VII of the Loeb edition of Xenophon). -- Jacket.

The fictitious, highly literary Letters of Alciphron (second century CE) are mostly to invented characters. Letters of Farmers by Aelian (c. 170-235 CE) portray the country ways of their imagined writers. The Erotic Epistles of Philostratus (perhaps born c. 170 CE) resemble and may have been influenced by those of Alciphron.

Isaeus (c. 420-350 BCE) composed speeches for others. He shares with Lysias pure Attic and lucidity of style, but his more aggressive and flexible presentation undoubtedly influenced Demosthenes. Of at least fifty attributed orations, there survive eleven on legacy cases and a large fragment dealing with a claim of citizenship.

Aristotle's 'De Anima' (On the Soul) is one of the great classics of philosophy. Aristotle examines the nature of the soul-sense-perception, imagination, cognition, emotion, and desire, including, memory, dreams, and processes such as nutrition, growth, and death.

If the work of Hippocrates be taken as representing the foundation upon which the edifice of historical Greek medicine was reared, then the work of GALEN, who lived some six hundred years later, may be looked upon as the summit of the same edifice. He was born in Pergamum A.D. 129, and both there and in other academic centres of the Aegean pursued his medical studies before being appointed physicial to the Pergamene gladiators in 157. Becoming dissatisfied with this type of practice he emigrated to Rome, where he soon won acknowledgement as the foremost medical authority of his time and where, with one brief interruption, he remained until his death in 199. His writings were so numerous and his reputation so influential that he was obliged to furnish his disciples with two handbooks, still extant, On the order of my writings and On my genuine works. Though the standard edition (by C.G. Kühn, 1821-33) runs to twenty-two volumes, On the Natural Faculties is still the only medical treatise of his available in English. Galen's merit is to have crystallised or brought to focus all the best work of the Greek medical schools which had preceded his own time. It is essentially in the form of Galenism that Greek medicine was transmitted to after ages. -- JACKET.