Natural History (Pliny) - Table of Contents

Table of Contents

The Natural History consists of 37 books. Pliny devised his own table of contents. The table below is a summary based on modern names for topics.

Volume Books Contents
I 1 Preface and tables of contents, lists of authorities
2 Mathematical and physical description of the world
II 3 - 6 Geography and ethnography
7 Anthropology and human physiology
III 8 - 11 Zoology
IV - VII 12 - 27 Botany, including agriculture, horticulture and pharmacology
VIII 28 - 32 Pharmacology
IX - X 33 - 37 Mining and mineralogy, especially in its application to life and art, including:
gold
casting in silver
statuary in bronze
painting
modelling
sculpture in marble
precious stones and gems

Read more about this topic:  Natural History (Pliny)

Famous quotes containing the words table of, table and/or contents:

    “A sigh for every so many breath,
    And for every so many sigh a death.
    That’s what I always tell my wife
    Is the multiplication table of life.”
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted.
    Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968)

    How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from false position; they fly into place by the action of the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)