450 



ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



of the scientific Renaissance involved a turning away from the 

 authority of Aristotle and the past, and an adoption of the Aris- 

 totelian method of observation and induction. 



Botany was the first to give visible signs of the awakening, 

 probably because of the dependence of medicine on plant products. 

 "All physicians professed to be botanists and every botanist was 

 thought fit to practice medicine." In the Herbals published in 

 Germany during the sixteenth century we can trace the growth of 





Fig. 290. — Andreas Vesalius. 



plant description and classification from mere annotations on the 

 text of Dioscorides to well-illustrated manuals of the plants of 

 western Europe. 



Meanwhile zoology began to emerge as a distinct science, but 

 the less obvious immediate utility of the subject, combined with 

 the greater difficulty of collecting and preserving animals, and 

 therefore the necessity of more dependence on travellers' tales, 

 contributed to retard its advance. One group of naturalists, the 

 encyclopaedists, so-called from their endeavor to gather all the 

 available information about living things, attempted the impos- 

 sible. However, this gleaning from the ancients and adding such 

 material as could be gathered led to the publication of huge volumes 

 of fact and fiction, which in the case of the best — Gesner's History 



