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The volume assembles an encyclopedic survey of the known world and its living inhabitants, moving from detailed regional geography and descriptions of seas, rivers, islands, and peoples to extended treatments of humanity, its generation, anatomy, and the origins and inventions of arts. Subsequent books catalog terrestrial animals—their habits, capture, and uses—followed by comprehensive observations on fish and marine creatures, their sizes and behaviors. Accounts mix naturalistic description, reported marvels, medicinal uses derived from animals, and travel and secondhand reports, organized as topical chapters intended as a practical compendium of natural and human phenomena.
We have one instance on record of remarkable acuteness of hearing; the noise of the battle, on the occasion when Sybaris1079 was destroyed, was heard, the day on which it took place, at Olympia.1080 But, as to the victory over the Cimbri,1081 and that over Perseus, the news of which was conveyed to Rome by the Castors,1082 they are to be looked upon in the light of visions and presages proceeding immediately from the gods.