The Lagoon - Armand Marie Leroi
Aristotle is known almost exclusively as a philosopher now, but he produced a huge body of scientific works—many the first in their fields. A great classifier, the Ancient notably practiced a wide range of sciences, including zoology, botany, chemistry, and even “cosmotheology,” in the playfully affectionate term Leroi gives to his subject’s struggle to explain the movements of planets. While Leroi, an evolutionary biologist, can be a stickler, correcting Aristotle on the finer points of cuttlefish physiology or the life cycle of eels, Leroi is in awe of how much his forebear discovered without knowing about nerves, cells, or genes. Following Aristotle in both a professional and a geographic sense, Leroi visited The Lagoon of Lesbos where the Greek pursued his passion for figuring out why things exist and take the forms they do, and how and why change occurs. Leroi’s study is engaging and insightful—a warm tribute to a great thinker and to the nature that Aristotle ardently believed did “nothing in vain.”
