CHAPTER VI 



LINNi^US AND SCIENTIFIC NATURAL HISTORY 



We turn now from the purely anatomical side to consider 

 the parallel development of the classification of animals and 

 of plants. Descriptive natural history reached a very low 

 level in the early Christian centuries, and remained there 

 throughout the Middle Ages. The return to the writings of 

 Aristotle was the first influence tending to lift it to the position 

 from which it had fallen. After the decline of ancient civili- 

 zation there w^as a period in which the writers of classical 

 antiquity were not read. Not only were the writings of the 

 ancient philosophers neglected, but so also were those of the 

 literary men as well, the poets, the story-tellers, and the his- 

 torians. As related in Chapter I, there were no observations 

 of animated nature, and the growing tendency of the educated 

 classes to envelop themselves in metaphysical speculations 

 was a feature of intellectual life. 



The Physiologus or Sacred Natural History. — During this 

 period of crude fancy, with a fog of mysticism obscuring all 

 phenomena of nature, there existed a peculiar kind of natural 

 history that was produced under theological influence. The 

 manuscripts in which this sacred natural history v;as em- 

 bodied exist in various forms and in about a dozen languages 

 of Eastern and Western Europe. The writings are known 

 under the general title of the Physiologus, or the Bestiarius. 

 This served for nearly a thousand years as the principal 

 source of thought regarding natural history. It contains 



110 



