ORNITHOLOGY 



Belon. of Pierre Belon's (Bellonius) Histoire de la nature des 

 Oyseaux. Gesner brought an amount of erudition, hit hertd 

 unequalled, to bear upon his subject; and, making due allow- 

 ance for the times 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 treatment. 

 Like nearly all his predecessors lince .Elian, he adopted an 

 alphabetical arrangement, 1 though this was not too pedanti- 

 cally preserved, and did not hinder him from placing 

 together the kinds of Birds which he supposed (and gene- 

 rally 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 recog- 

 nizing 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, written in French, 

 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 his own or of a 

 preceding age. Besides 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 illustrated with woodcuts, many of which 

 display much spirit and regard to accuracy. 



Belon, as has just been said, had a knowledge of the 

 anatomy of Birds, and he seems to have been the first to 

 institute a direct comparison of their skeleton with that of 

 Man ; but in this respect he only anticipated by a few 



Coiter. years the more precise researches of Volcher Goiter, a 

 Frisian, who in 1573 and 1575 published at Nuremberg 

 two treatises, in one of which the internal structure of 

 Birds in general is very creditably described, while in the 

 other the osteology and myology of certain forms is given 

 in considerable detail, and illustrated by carefully-drawn 

 figures. The first is entitled Externarum <t internarum 

 principalium humani corporis Tabulae, <fcc, while the second) 

 which is the most valuable, is merely appended to the 

 Leetioius <;<-hr:t'lix Fallopii de partialis similaribus humani 

 corporis, &c, and thus, the scope of each work being 

 regarded as medical, the author's labours were wholly over- 

 looked by the mere natural-historians who followed, though 

 Coiter introduced a table, " De differentiis Allium," furnish- 

 ing a key to a rough classification of such Birds as were 

 known to him, and this as nearly the first attempt of the 

 kind deserves notice here. 



Aldro- Contemporary with these three men was Ulysses Aldro- 



vamlus. vandus, a Bolognese, who wrote an Historia Naturaliwm 

 in sixteen folio volumes, most of which were not printed 

 till after his death in 1G05; but those on Birds appeared 

 between 1599 and 1603. The work is almost wholly a 

 compilation, and that not of the most discriminative kind, 

 while a peculiar jealousy of Gesner is continuously displayed, 

 though his statements are very constantly quoted — nearly 

 always as those of " Ornithologus," his name appearing but 

 few times in the text, and not at all in the list of authors 



1 Even at the present day it may be shrewdly suspected that not 

 a few ornithologist . wuuM gladly follow Gesner's plan in theirdespair 

 of seeing, in their own time, a classification which would really deserve 

 the epithet scientific. 



2 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. 



cited. With certain modifications in principle not very 

 important, but characterized by much more elaborate detail, 

 Aldrovandus adopted Belon's method of arrangement, but 

 in a few respects there is a manifest retrogression. The work 

 of Aldrovandus was illustrated by copper-plates, but none 

 of his figures approach those of his immediate predecessors 

 in character or accuracy. Nevertheless the book was 

 eagerly sought, and several editions of it appeared. 3 



Mention must be made of a medical treatise by Caspar Schwenck 

 Schwenckfeld, published at Liegnitz in 1603, under the feld. 

 title of Theriotropfa urn Silesiae, the fourth book of which 

 consists of an " Aviarium Silesiae," and is the earliest of 

 the works we now know by the name of Fauna. The 

 author was well acquainted with the labours of his predeces- 

 sors, as his list of over one hundred of them testifies. Most 

 of the Birds he describes are characterized with accuracy 

 sufficient to enable them to be identified, and his obser- 

 vations upon them have still some interest ; but he was 

 innocent of any methodical system, and was not exempt 

 from most of the professional fallacies of his time. 4 



Hitherto, from the nature of the case, the works aforesaid 

 treated of scarcely any but the Birds belonging to the orhis 

 veteribus notus ; but the geographical discoveries of the 

 sixteenth century began to bear fruit, and many animals of 

 kinds unsuspected were, about one hundred years later, 

 made known. Here there is only space to name Bontius, 

 Clusius, Hernandez (or Fernandez), Marcgrave, 

 Nieiiemberg, and Piso, 6 whose several works describing 

 the natural products of both the Indies — whether the 

 result of their own observation or compilation — together 

 with those of Olina and Worm, produced a marked effect, 

 since they led up to what may be deemed the foundation of 

 scientific Ornithology. 6 



This foundation was laid by the joint labours of Francis Wil- 

 Willughby (born 1635, died 1672) and John Bay (born lughby 

 1628, died 1705), for it is impossible to separate their andKay " 

 share of work in Natural History more than to say that, 

 while the former more especially devoted himself to zoology, 

 botany was the favourite pursuit of the latter. Together 

 they studied, together they travelled, and together they 

 collected. Willughby, the younger of the two, and at first 

 the other's pupil, seems to have gradually become the 

 master ; but, he dying before the promise of his life was ful- 

 filled, his writings were given to the world by his friend 

 Bay, who, adding to them from his own stores, published 

 the Ornithologia in Latin in 1676, and in English with 

 many emendations in 1678. In this work Birds generally 

 were grouped in two great divisions — " Land-Fowl " and 

 "Water-Fowl," — the former being subdivided into those 

 which have a crooked beak and talons and those which have 

 a straighter bill and claws, while the latter was separated 

 into those which frequent waters and watery places and 

 those that swim in the water — each subdivision being 

 further broken up into many sections, to the whole of which 

 a key was given. Thus it became possible for almost any 

 diligent reader without much chance of error to refer to its 



3 The IIisi<,,iu Natwralis of Johannes Johnstonus, Baid to be of 

 Scottish descent but by birth a Pole, ran through several editions 

 during the seventeenth century, but is little more than an epitome 

 of the work of Aldrovandus. 



4 The Hierozoicmi of Bocliart— a treatise on the animals named in 

 Holy Writ — was published in 1619. 



6 For Lichtenstein's determination of the Birds described by 

 Marcgrave and Piso see the Abhandltmgcn of the Berlin Academy 

 for 1817 (pp. 155 sq.). 



6 The earliest, list of British Birds seems to be that in the Pinax 

 Ilfi-inii Xalnriiliiim of Christopher Merrett, published in 1667. 

 In the following year appeared the ",/.,,„,',,/,',■,,„ Znoicon of Walter 

 Chakleton, which contains some information on ornithology. An 



ci d;ir 1 edition of the bitter, under the title of ExercilitUoncs &c., was 



published in 1677; but neither of these writers is of much authority. 

 In 1684 Sibbald in his Scotia illustrate published the earliest Fauna 

 of Scotland. 



