AN OLD NATURALIST CONRAD GESNER. 



53 



or referred to and of the correspondents who supplied notes, illus- 

 trations, and oral information includes nearly every ancient and 

 mediaeval writer who makes any reference to animals. He draws 

 from many works which are now known only through his refer- 

 ences, and his long list of friends and helpers includes Italians, 

 Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Swiss, and Poles. 



He tells us that while it is easy to assert that history should 

 be written from the best books only, he has found no book too 

 bad to yield something to judicious study, and that he has ignored 

 nothing. 



" Only those who have tried," he says, " can know what a labor 

 it is to compare the works of different authors and to bring all 

 into unity, with nothing overlooked and nothing repeated. This 

 I have tried to do so faithfully that all may be brought together, 

 a library in itself, so 

 that no one need here- 

 after consult other 

 writers on the ground 

 which I have covered. 

 As my only purpose," 

 he tells us, " is to make 

 the work more useful 

 and accurate, I have 

 exercised the more in- 

 credulity and have crit- 

 ically revised the quo- 

 tations, and, when pos- 

 sible, verified them by 

 original observations 

 and dissections." 



The completeness of 

 the work is astonish- 

 ing when we bear in 

 mind that he was only 

 thirty-five when the 

 first part appeared, and 

 that he had already 

 published thirty-four 



works, among them two which are as remarkable as the Natural 

 History for learning and industry, and that all the illustrations 

 for the Natural History were prepared and the whole book written 

 with his own hand and printed in eight years. 



The dignity and thoroughness of his work are in strong con- 

 trast to many of the discursive and trivial works of his time, and 

 his compilation was made with good judgment and independence. 

 When he now and then quotes descriptions of fabulous or imagi- 



Fig. 5. 



