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This curious state of the Aristotelian writings has given rise to much discussion among scholars and to explain it there has been developed what is known as the ‘notebook theory’. It is supposed that the bases of the material that we possess were notebooks put together by Aristotle himself for his own use, probably while lecturing. These passed, it is believed, into the hands of certain of his pupils and were perhaps in places incomprehensible as they stood. Such pupils, after the master’s death, filled out the notebooks either from the memory of his teaching or from their own knowledge—or ignorance. Thus modified, however, they were still not prepared for publication, even in the limited sense in which works may be said to have been published in those days, but they formed again the fuller bases of notes for lectures delivered by his successors. In this form they have finally survived to our time, suffering, however, from certain further losses and displacements on a larger scale. Some of the ‘Aristotelian’ works are undoubtedly more deeply spurious, but the works that are regarded as ‘genuine’ do not seem to have been seriously tampered with, except by mere scribal or bookbinders’ blunders, at any date later than a generation or two following Aristotle’s own time. These notebooks as they stand are in fact probably in much the state in which we should find them were we able to retrieve a copy dating from the first or second century b. c.[20]