According to popular belief ostriches eat and digested 

 iron ; bears licked their new-born cubs into shape ; moles had 

 no eyes and elephants no knees; the swan sings before it 

 dies; the chameleon lives only on air; the fish remora swim- 

 ming beneath a ship retards the movements of the vessel as 

 a lodestone attracts iron; and 



" The toad, ugly and venemous 



Wears yet a precious jewel in its head." 



To these extraordinary fancies may be added the firmly 

 grounded belief that barnacles growing on trees fall into 

 water and are transformed into geese; lovely mermaids with 

 captivating manners entice men to their destruction; water- 

 bulls perform terrifying deeds; while preposterous behavior 

 was attributed to young vipers, birds of paradise, pelicans, 

 tarantulas, scorpions, and to every "living creature after its 

 kind, creeping thing and beast of the earth." The temptation 

 to enumerate more of the barnacles that were attached to 

 zoology is great but must be resisted. 



Pliny in his Natural History included botany, enumerating 

 six hundred plants, and commentators in the sixteenth cen- 

 tury made efforts to identify the imperfectly described species; 

 physicians using botanical remedies felt the need of greater 

 accuracy and began to form collections of their own, and to 

 study them systematically. The first to suggest the classifi- 

 cation by classes, order, genera and species was Conrad 

 Gesner just named. During the sixteenth century many treat- 

 ises on plants appeared, the most valuable contributions 

 being made by Andrea Caesalpinus, Professor of Botany at 

 Padua, who proposed a sexual classification, and by the 

 brothers John and Gaspard Bauhin of Switzerland, one of 

 whom published a systematic index to plants in which syno- 

 nyms were grouped together. 



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