INTRODUCTION 



William Turner, a Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecu- 

 tion at home, printed at Cologne in 1544 the first commentary on the 

 Birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the 

 spirit that moves modern naturalists. ^ In the same year and from the 

 same press was issued a Dialogus de Avihus by Gybertus Longolius, and 

 in 1570 Caius brought out in London his treatise De rarioruvi animalnim 

 atque stirpium historia. In this last work, small though it be, ornithology 

 has a good share ; and all three may still be consulted with interest and 

 advantage by its votaries.^ Meanwhile the study received a great impulse 

 from the appearance, at Zurich in 1555, of the third book of the illustrious 

 Conrad Gesner's Historia Animalium " qvi est de Auium natura," and at 

 Paris in the same year of Pierre Belon's (Bellonius) Histoire de la nature 

 des Oyseaux. Gesner brought an amount of erudition, hitherto unequalled, 

 to bear upon his subject ; and, making due allowance for the time in 

 which he wrote, his judgment must in most respects be deemed excellent. 

 In his work, however, there is little that can be called systematic treat- 

 ment. Like nearly all his predecessors since -(Elian, he adopted an 

 alphabetical arrangement,^ though this was not too pedantically preserved, 

 and did not hinder him from placing together the kinds of Birds which he 

 supposed (and generally supposed rightly) to have the most resemblance 

 to that one whose name, being best known, was chosen for the headpiece 

 (as it were) of his particular theme, thus recognizing to some extent the 

 principle of classification.* Belon, with perhaps less book-learning than 

 his contemporary, was evidently no mean scholar, and undoubtedly had 

 more practical knowledge of Birds — their internal as well as external 

 structure. Hence his work contains a far greater amount of original 

 matter ; and his personal observations made in many countries, from 

 England to Egypt, enabled him to avoid most of the puerilities which 

 disfigure other works of liis own or of a preceding age. Beside this, Belon 

 disposed the Birds known to him according to a definite system, which 

 (rude as we now know it to be) formed a foundation on which several of 

 his successors were content to build, and even to this day traces of its 

 influence may still be discerned in the arrangement followed by writers 

 who have faintly appreciated the principles on which modern taxonomers 

 rest the outline of their schemes. Both his work and that of Gesner were 



capp. xxiii.-lxxx.) is a good deal about birds -whicli is not altogether nonsense. This 

 work was edited for the Rolls Series, in 1863, by the same Mr. Wright. 



^^This was reprinted at Cambridge in 1823 by the late Dr. George Thackeray. 



2 The Seventh of Wotton's De differentiis animalium Libri Decern, published at 

 Paris in 1552, treats of Bu'ds ; but his work is merely a compilation from Aristotle 

 and Pliny, with references to other classical ■writers who have more or less incidentally 

 mentioned Birds and other animals. The author in his preface states — " Veterum 

 scriptorum sententias in unum quasi cumulum coaceruaui, de meo nihil addidi." 

 Nevertheless he makes some attempt at a systematic arrangement of Birds, which, 

 according to his lights, is far from despicable. 



■'Even at the present day it maybe shrewdly suspected that not a few orni- 

 thologists would gladly follow Gesner's plan in their despair of seeing, in their own 

 time, a classification which would really deserve the epithet scientific. 



* For instance, under the title of "Accipiter " we have to look, not only for the 

 Sparrow-Hawk and Gos-Hawk, but for many other birds of the Family (as we now 

 call it) removed comparatively far from those species by modern ornithologists. 



