14 STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY. 
comprehension and the credulity of the sixteenth 
century, and was doubtless held in much higher 
estimation than the masterly but too philosophic 
treatise of the great Aristotle. The laborious 
naturalists alluded to were Conrad Gesner* and 
Ulysses Aldrovandus; the first a physician of 
Zurich, the latter of a noble house of Bologna, in 
the university of which city he was a professor. 
Gesner was born in 1516, and died at the age of 49; 
so that it would seem he did not live to see the 
publication of his work, which was printed in three 
folio volumes at Frankfort, in the year 1585. He 
appears to have been an industrious compiler of 
other men’s labours, adding little of his own, and 
quite destitute of all notions of system, the subjects 
being arranged alphabetically. This voluminous 
compendium is ornamented with wood-cuts of very 
unequal execution; some being very tolerable, others 
very bad. Aldrovandus, who must have been work- 
ing at the same time (for he was born in 1525), 
dedicated his life and his fortune to a similar under- 
taking, still more diffuse and voluminous than the 
compilation of Gesner: he, likewise, lived not to see 
the publication of his work, which extended to no 
less than fourteen folio volumes, the greatest portion 
of which were printed after his death. The original 
descriptions in this work are more numerous ana 
accurate than those of Gesner, but its author had 
little judgment and still less genius for his task: he 
collects from all quarters every thing that had been 
* Conrade Gesneri Tigurini, Historia Animalium. Franco- 
furti, 1585. 
