HISTORICAL PREFACE xxi. 



to Science by an earh- death at forty-nine. In the 

 " Historia Animalium," of which Liber III., " de avium 

 natura," was given to the world in L555, Gesner puts the 

 Gannet after the Geese, but the alphabetical arrangement 

 generally adopted by him prevented anything like 

 systematic grouping, and immediately after the Gannet 

 follows the Great Bustard. Gesner repeats what Turner 

 and Hector Boece the historian had said of the Bass or 

 Scotch Goose, but he was evidently unacquainted with 

 the passage which refers to these birds in Major's 

 " Historia Majoris Britannise " mentioned above, which 

 had been published some thirty-four years previously. 



Scarcely less celebrated was the Fleming, de I'Escluse, 

 better known as Carolus Clusius, whose account of the 

 Gannet in the " Exoticorum Libri " (1005) has been 

 referred to several times {see pp. 17, 30, 260), and it 

 only needs to be remarked that in his figure, which was 

 done from an American specimen, the convexity of the 

 breast feathers is distinctly shoAvn. 



After Gesner, although tlie study of Ornithology was not 

 at a standstill, there was nothing for a time written 

 about the Gannet which could be called new. There is 

 little that is worth quoting in the classical works of Jolin 

 Caius (1570), and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1599-1603), and some 

 later authors were content, for want of first-hand knowledge, 

 to copy from one another. Neither have I thought it 

 necessary to quote from Sir Robert Sibbald's two works, 

 published in 1684 and 1710 (referred to on p. 30), in both of 

 which he seems to have helped liimself freely from the 

 MS. which John Blaeu had used in 1654. 



