In the Bastern Aegean lies an island of silver _olive groves, green marshes and forested hills. In the spring, migrating birds fill its skies and flowers fill its meadows. There is a lagoon, clear and calm, that cuts the island nearly in two-and it was on these shores, more than two thousand years ago, that science was born. In 345 BC Aristotle, young and newly married, arrived on the island. In Athens, he had been taught by Plato to seek truth in the intangible realm of ideas. But, rejecting his teacher's meta-physics, Aristotle turned to the natural world and began the greatest of all human endeavors. He catalogued the animals in his world. He observed them, dissected them and recorded how they lived, fed and bred. He described the salaciousness of sparrows, the sexual incontinence of girls, the stomachs of snails, the sensitivity of sponges, the sounds of cicadas and the structure of the human heart. And then he explained it all. The Lagoon is the story of how Aristotle founded science; how for centuries his work was celebrated and how, in the Scientific Revolution, it was con-demned. In this luminous book, acclaimed biologist Armand Marie Leroi recovers Aristotle's sci-ence, beautiful, vast and forgotten. He examines the creatures that Aristotle knew and loved, his profound ideas and inspired theories, as well as the things that he got wildly wrong. Modern science still bears the stamp of its founder. Even now, Aristotle teaches us how to discover new worlds. 0914

ISBN: 9780670026746