ORNITHOLOGY 



as be tells us, predecessors ; and, looking to that portion of 

 his works on animals which has come down to us, one finds 

 that, though more than 170 sorts of Birds are mentioned, 1 

 yel what is said of them amounts on the whole to very 

 little, and this consists more of desultory observations in 

 illustration of his general remarks (which are to a con- 

 siderable extent physiological or bearing on the subject of 

 reproduction) than of an attempt at a connected account 

 of Birds. Some of these observations are so meagre as to 

 have given plenty of occupation to his many commentators, 

 who with varying success have for more than three hundred 

 years been endeavouring to determine what were the Birds 

 of which he wrote : and the admittedly corrupt state of the 

 text adds to their difficulties. One of the most recent 

 of these commentators, the late Prof. Sundevall — equally 

 proficient in classical as in ornithological knowledge — was, 

 in 1803, compelled to leave more than a score of the Birds 

 unrecognized. Yet it is not to be supposed that in what 

 survives of the great philosopher's writings we have more 

 than a fragment of the knowledge possessed by him, though 

 the hope of recovering his Zwiko. or his 'Avaro/axa, in which 

 he seems to have given fuller descriptions of the animals 

 he knew, can be hardly now entertained. A Latin transla- 

 tion by Gaza of Aristotle's existing zoological work was 

 printed at Venice in 1503. Another version, by Scaliger, 

 was subsequently published. Two wretched English trans- 

 lations have appeared. 



Pliny. Next in order of date, though at a long interval, comes 



Caius Plinius Secundus, commonly known as Pliny the 

 Elder, who died a.d. 79, author of a general and very dis- 

 cursive Historia Naturalis in thirty-seven books, of which 

 Book X. is devoted to Birds. A considerable portion of 

 Pliny's work may be traced to his great predecessor, of 

 whose information he freely and avowedly availed himself, 

 while the additions thereto made cannot be said to be, 

 on the whole, improvements. Neither of these authors 

 attempted to classify the Birds known to them beyond a 

 very rough and for the most part obvious grouping. 

 Aristotle seems to recognize eight principal groups : — (1) 

 Gampsonyches, approximately equivalent to the Accipitres 

 of Linnaeus ; (2) Scolecophaga, containing most of what 

 would now be called Oscines, excepting indeed the (3) 

 Acanthophaga, composed of the Goldfinch, Siskin, and a 

 few others; (4) Scnipophaga, the Woodpeckers; (5) 

 Peristeroide, or Pigeons ; (6) Schizopoda, (7) Steganopoda, 

 and (8) Barea, nearly the same respectively as the Linnaean 

 Grallx, Anseres, and Gallinse. Pliny, relying wholly on 

 characters taken from the feet, limits himself to three 

 groups — without assigning names to them — those which 

 have "hooked tallons, as Hawkes ; or round long clawes, 

 as Hennes ; or else they be broad, flat, and whole-footed, as 

 Geese and all the sort in manner of water-foule " — to use 

 the words of Philemon Holland, who, in 1601, published a 

 quaint and, though condensed, yet fairly faithful English 

 translation of Pliny's work. 



-Elian. About a century later came /Elian, who died about a.d. 

 140, and compiled in Greek (though he was an Italian 

 by birth) a number of miscellaneous observations on the 

 peculiarities of animals. His work is a kind of common- 

 place book kept without scientific discrimination. A con- 

 siderable number of Birds are mentioned, and something 

 said of almost each of them; but that something is too 

 often nonsense — according to modern ideas — though 

 occasionally a fact of interest may therein be found. It 

 contains numerous references to former or contemporary 

 writers whose works have perished, but there is nothing 

 to shew that they were wiser than .Elian himself. 



'This is Sundevall's estimate; Drs Aubert and Wimmer in their 

 excellent edition of the 'io-ropiai irep! £<jW (Leipzig : 1868) limit the 

 number to 126. 



The twenty -six books De Animalibus of ALBERTUS Albertus 

 Magnus (Groot), who died a.d. 1282, were printed in Magnus. 

 1478 ; but were apparently already will known from manu- 

 script copies. They are founded on the works of Aristotle, 

 many of whose statements are almost literally repeated, and 

 often without acknowledgment. Occasionally Avicenna, 

 or some other less-known author, is quoted ; but it is 

 hardly too much to say that the additional information is 

 almost worthless. The twenty-third of these books is De 

 Ambus, and therein a great number of Birds' names make 

 their earliest appearance, few of which are without interest 

 from a philologist's if not an ornithologist's point of view, 

 but there is much difficulty in recognizing the species to 

 which many of them belong. In 1485 was printed the 

 first dated copy of the volume known as the Ortus 

 Sanitatis, to the popularity of which many editions testify. 

 Though said by its author, Johann Wonnecke von Caub Cuba. 

 (Latinized as Johannes de Cuba), 2 to have been composed 

 from a study of the collections formed by a certain noble- 

 man who had travelled in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, 

 and Egypt — possibly Breidenbach, an account of whose 

 travels in the Levant was printed at Mentz in 1486 — it is 

 really a medical treatise, and its zoological portion is mainly 

 an abbreviation of the writings of Albertus Magnus, with 

 a few interpolations from Isidorus of Seville (who flour- 

 ished in the beginning of the seventh century, and was the 

 author of many works highly esteemed in the Middle Ages) 

 and a work known as Physiologus (q.v.). The third trac- 

 tatus of this volume deals with Birds — including among 

 them Bats, Bees, and other flying creatures; but as it is the 

 first printed book in which figures of Birds are introduced 

 it merits notice, though most of the illustrations, which are 

 rude woodcuts, fail, even in the coloured copies, to give 

 any precise indication of the species intended to be repre- 

 sented. The scientific degeneracy of this work is mani- 

 fested as much by its title (Ortus for Hortus) as by the 

 mode in which the several subjects are treated ; 3 but the 

 revival of learning was at hand, and William Turner, a Turner. 

 Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecution 

 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. 1 

 In the same year and from the same press was issued a 

 Dialogus de Avibiis by Gybertus Longolius, and in 1570 Longo- 

 Caius brought out in London his treatise De rariorum lius - 

 anvmalium atque stirpium historia. In this last work, small Calus - 

 though it be, ornithology has a good share ; and all three 

 may still be consulted with interest and advantage by its 

 votaries. 6 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 Gesner. 

 "qvi est de Auium natura," and at Paris in the same year 



2 On this point see G. A. Pritzel, Botan. Zeitung, 1846, pp. 785-790, 

 and Thes. Literat. Botonicx (Lipsise : 1851), pp. 349-352. 



3 Absurd as much that we find both in Albertus Magnus and the Ortus 

 seems to modern eyes, if we go a step lower in the scale and consult the 

 ' 'Bestiaries" or treatises on animals which were common from the twelfth 

 to the fourteenth century we shall meet with many more absurdities. 

 See for instance that by Philipfk be Thaun (Philippus Taonensis), 

 dedicated to Adelaide or Alice, queen of Henry I. of England, and pro- 

 bably written soon after 1121, as printed by the late Mr Thomas Wright, 

 in his Popular Treatises on Science vmtten during the Middle Ages 

 < London: 1841). 



4 This was reprinted at Cambridge in 1S23 by the late Dr George 

 Thackeray. 



5 The Seventh of Wotton's lie differentiisaninurfium Liori Decern, 

 published at Paris in 1552, treats of Birds; 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. 



