98 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



Far superior to the works on the fishes is Belon's second main treatise: 

 Histoire des oyseaux. In this work he describes and illustrates all the birds he 

 knows, arranged in groups according to their structure and habits — birds 

 of prey, waterfowl, shore-birds, ground-pecking, wood-pecking, omnivo- 

 rous, and small birds, divided into Insectivora and Granivora. The individual 

 forms are characterized by a few names in Latin, Greek, and French; unlike 

 Gesner, Belon scorns to extend his knowledge of languages. If this attempt 

 at classification bears witness to Belon's keen powers of observation, there 

 is still further proof of them in the attention he pays to the morphology and 

 anatomy of the individual forms. The structure of beaks and claws is closely 

 studied and compared in different forms, while anatomical relations are 

 treated in the same way. Most noteworthy, however, is the detailed com- 

 parison in both text and illustration, in the first book of the work, between 

 the skeleton of a man and that of a bird, the latter drawn in an attitude cor- 

 responding to that which the former assumes in his natural standing position. 

 Although this comparison by no means agrees in every detail — for instance, 

 the human clavicle and the bird's coracoid bone are made homologous — at 

 any rate we have here a first attempt at a comparative anatomical investi- 

 gation. The idea thus started by Belon was, it is true, for a long time neg- 

 lected; it was not until two centuries later that it was taken up anew by 

 Buffon, to be eventually developed by Cuvier into one of the most important 

 fields of biological research. The fact that these two were both countrymen 

 of Belon is indeed some evidence that his activities in this sphere did not 

 pass entirely unnoticed. 



z. Anatomy 



That the age of comparative anatomy had not yet arrived was of course due 

 to the fact that research was still fully occupied with purely descriptive 

 anatomy. In this, as in other spheres, the Renaissance inherited from the 

 great anatomists of antiquity, of whom Galen constituted the chief author- 

 ity, in his reputation comparable with Aristotle, and like him regarded with 

 infinite respect by the physicians of the Renaissance, who were philologi- 

 cally rather than biologically educated. However, it was not the phy- 

 sicians alone who required anatomical knowledge; even art, the result of 

 the admiration of the Renaissance for antiquity, now began to demand a 

 closer study of the structure of the human body. Amongst the pioneers in 

 this field the first name that should be mentioned is that of the great universal 

 genius Leonardo da Vinci (i45x-i5I9). 



Leonardo was a Florentine, and in his native city, which was the very 

 centre of Renaissance culture, he was brought up to be an artist and at the 



