Metaphysics, the science of being as being in contradistinction from a science of a particular species of being, the science of sciences, or the science of the ultimate grounds of all these, and presupposed by them, called by Plato dialectics, or the logic of being.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Metamorphosis * Metastasio