It is important to understand clearly the criterion which he applied; it is frequently misapprehended.
Yet in this matter Gibbon has been grossly misapprehended and misrepresented.
Instead of reading Aristotle and other naturalists, people went for information to commonplace books like those of Aelian, in which scraps of folk-lore, travellers' tales and fragments of misapprehended science were set forth in an elegant style.