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Classification of Living Beings

In his book, Historia Animalium or History of Animals, Aristotle was the first person in human history to venture into the classification of different animals. He used traits that are common among certain animals to classify them into similar groups.For example, based on the presence of blood, he created two different groups such as animals with blood and animals without blood. Similarly, based on their habitat, he classified animals as ones that live in water and ones that live on land.In his perspective, life had a hierarchical make-up and all living beings could be grouped in this hierarchy based on their position from lowest to highest. He placed the human species highest in this hierarchy.

Founder of zoology

Aristotle is also known as the Father of Zoology. As evident from his classification of living beings, all his classification procedures and several other treatises primarily involved different species of the animal kingdom only. However, he wrote a number of treatises that revolved around different aspects of zoology as well. Some of his popular treatises such as History of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals and others were based on the study of different land, water, and aerial animals.Unlike his predecessors who merely documented their routine observations of nature, Aristotle worked on outlining specific techniques that he would use to make specific observations.

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