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Among the objects of Natural History, which attracted the attention, and excited the wonder of the followers of Alexander the Great, when that illustrious conqueror Carried his victorious arras across the Indus, was the Banyan, or Indian Fig-Tree. It is well known that that extraordinary man, whose talents, as well as achievements, have certainly no parallel in history, was generally imbued with a love of science, and, as Pliny expresses it, inflamed with a passion for Natural History.* To his great preceptor, Aristotle, he had delegated the care of digesting, and elucidating, the vast materials that were collected, in the king's progress through a quarter of the globe, which, to the inhabitants of Europe, was absolutely a new world. |
