817 



VAHL, MARTIN. 



VAILLANT, FRANCOIS LE. 



213 



Del Vaga, with the exception of Giulio Romano and Penni, surpassed 

 all the assistants of Raffaelle. He was a great draughtsman and exe- 

 cuted with rapidity. Vasari considered him the best designer among 

 the Florentines after Michel Angelo, and the most able of Raffaelle's 

 scholars. His design however resembles more that of Michel Angelo 

 than that of Raffaelle, but he coloured much in the style of Raffaelle. 

 He painted many works in Rome : the best is generally considered the 

 ' Creation of Eve,' in the church of San Marcello. There are numerous 

 works by him in various cities of Italy, in Tivoli, in Florence, in Lucca, 

 in Pisa, and in Genoa, where he painted his greatest works, and held 

 the same position that Giulio Romano held at Mantua ; they were 

 respectively the founders of the schools of Genoa and of Mantua. Del 

 Vaga left Rome at the sack of that place in 1527, when he lost all his 

 property, and repaired to Genoa, where Prince Doria took him imme- 

 diately into hia service, and employed him to superintend the decora- 

 tion of his new palace. The great works executed by Vaga in this 

 palaco were amongst the finest paintings in Italy, but most of them 

 are now destroyed. The subjects were chiefly from Roman history 

 and the Heathen mythology. On the ceiling of the great hall he 

 painted in oil the Shipwreck of Maeaa and his comrades, but it has 

 since been whitewashed. On the ceiling of a neighbouring apartment he 

 painted in fresco Jupiter destroying the Giants ; a work which alone, 

 eays Soprani, is sufficient to immortalise its author, and to render the 

 palace valuable. 



Vaga returned to Rome after staying some years at Genoa, and was 

 much employed by Pope Paul III., who granted him a pension for life 

 of twenty-five ducats per month. Shortly before his death his reputa- 

 tion was so great in Rome that nearly all the great works in painting 

 were executed under his direction or from his designs, and he was so 

 much occupied that he made only the cartoons of his works, the 

 painting of them being intrusted to his scholars and assistants, who 

 were very numerous. By incessant application, combined with intem- 

 perate habits, he hastened his death. He died in 1547, in his forty- 

 seventh year, and was buried in the Rotonda, where Raffaelle and other 

 great painters were buried. 



Hia principal scholars were Luzio Romano, Marcello Venusti, Giro- 

 lamo da Sermoneta, and the Spaniard Luis de Vargas. Caraglio, 

 Bonasone, Hollar, and others have engraved after his works. 



VAHL, MARTIN, a botanist, was born on the 10th of October 

 1749, at Bergen in Norway. Having received his preliminary education 

 at Bergen, he was entered a student of the university of Copenhagen 

 in 1766, and resided in the house of the Rev. Hans Stroem, a distin- 

 guished naturalist. It was here that he imbibed his taste for botany, 

 and having lived at Copenhagen two years, he left for Upsal, in order 

 that he might study under Linnaeus. Here he became one of the 

 most distinguished pupils of the great botanist, and remained at 

 Upsal for five years. His intercourse however with his preceptor was 

 suddenly interrupted by a domestic occurrence, for " it was scarcely 

 to be expected," says Smith, " that the dignified professor, then in the 

 zenith of his prosperity and honours, could favourably regard the 

 inclination of one of his daughters for a student who had his own 

 fortune to seek ; nor is anything recorded of this daughter which might 

 have justified a romantic attachment or adventurous pursuit on the 

 part of the young man." 



In 1779 Vahl was appointed lecturer at the Botanic Garden of 

 Copenhagen, where, having remained three years, he was appointed 

 by the king of Denmark to undertake a scientific tour, during which 

 he visited Holland, France, Italy, Spain, Barbary, Switzerland, and 

 England. In these various countries he made large collections of 

 plants, and visited their principal museums. Whilst in England he 

 was in constant intercourse with Sir J. Banks and Sir J. E. Smith, to 

 whose herbaria and libraries he had constant access, and he availed 

 himself extensively of this privilege. 



On his return to Copenhagen in 1785, he was appointed professor 

 of natural history in the university, and was intrusted with the 

 continuation of the ' Flora Danica,' already commenced by CEder. 

 This work was completed in twenty-four fasciculi, seven of which 

 were done previous to its having been undertaken by Vahl. He made 

 several jourueys to the coasts and mountains of Norway for the 

 purpose of getting materials for this work, which was completed in 

 1810. In 1790 he commenced a work entitled ' Symbolse Botanicse.' 

 It appeared in three folio fasciculi, each fasciculus containing twenty- 

 five plates. The principal object of this work was to illustrate 

 Forskal's discoveries ; but Vahl gave descriptions and drawings of 

 many plants from his own collections. In 1796 he commenced the 

 publication of his ' Eclogse Americana?,' which was a sequel to the 

 ' Symbolse,' and consisted of three fasciculi containing in all thirty 

 plates. 



In 1799 and 1800 the government again paid his expenses in 

 visiting Holland and Paris, for the purpose of examining botanical 

 specimens, to enable him to bring out a great work which he had in 

 contemplation on the whole vegetable kingdom. On returning to 

 Copenhagen from this visit, he was appointed professor of botany in 

 the university. He lived to complete only one volume of his great 

 work entitled ' Enuuaeratio Plantarum.' This was published in 1804 : 

 he died on the 24th of December of the same year ; and five more 

 volumes were published subsequently. His extensive librai-y, con- 

 sisting of 3000 volumes of books, his herbarium, and manuscripts, 



were purchased by the king of Denmark for 3000 dollars (about 675?.), 

 besides an annual pension of 400 dollars to his widow, and of 100 

 dollars to each of his six children. 



Vahl also paid attention to zoology : he communicated remarks on 

 the carnivora to Cuvier, and also some observations on insects to 

 Fabricius, and assisted in the completion of the ' Zoologia Danica,' a 

 work that had not appeared at his death. He was a learned and 

 zealous botanist, and his works will remain a monument of his accurate 

 acquaintance with a large portion of the vegetable kingdom. Vahlia, 

 a genus of Saxifragaceous plants, was named in honour of him by 

 Thunberg. 



(Biographic Universelle ; Sir J. E. Smith, in Ree's Cyclopcedia,) 



VAILLANT, FRANCOIS LE, was born in 1753, at Paramaribo, in 

 Dutch Guiana, where his father, a rich merchant and native of Metz, 

 was French consul. His parents had a taste for collecting objects of 

 natural history. They were also in the habit of making frequent 

 excursions to the less settled parts of the colony, always carrying the 

 boy along with them. Le Vaillant at an early age had thus not only 

 contracted the tastes of his parents and the habits of the backwoods- 

 man, but at the age of ten years had acquired considerable experience 

 in collecting, and arranging after a system of his own, insects and 

 birds. 



In 1765 the family of Le Vaillant left Surinam to return to Europe. 

 They landed at the Texel, and after spending some time in Holland 

 proceeded to Metz. Here Le Vaillant found a fresh stimulus to his 

 favourite pursuits in the ornithological cabinet of M. Bdcccur. In 

 Surinam he had been accustomed to dry and preserve the skins of 

 birds : he now set himself assiduously to acquire the art of preserving 

 the form and attitude of life by stuffing them. A passionate hunter, 

 he tells us that during a residence of two years in Germany and of 

 seven in Alsatia and Lorraine, he killed an immense number of birds. 

 But he had also a taste for observing their habits, and spent whole 

 days and even nights in watching them. These pursuits were in him 

 the indulgence of a passion. What plan of education his parents 

 adopted, or whether they destined him for any profession, is unknown. 

 The only hint preserved on this subject is an incidental observation 

 in his Travels, that his father insisted upon his acquiring a number of 

 languages. Dutch he spoke fluently probably learnt in childhood ; 

 German and French, it is said, he also spoke well, though his writings 

 are alleged by critics to want the idiomatic precision of a native. 



In 1777 he came to Paris, where the rich collections of birds and 

 the writings and conversation of naturalists at first attracted and then 

 repelled him. He felt and acknowledged the genius of those in whose 

 hands observations such as he had made self-taught after the desultory 

 fashion of an amateur had become a science. He was delighted with. 

 the varied wealth of collections from all quarters of the world which 

 were opened to his inspection. But accustomed to pry into the habits 

 and economy of the living bird, the mere cataloguing and classifying of 

 skins and skeletons soon became repulsive to him ; and the inaccura- 

 cies of mere closet speculators nourished a perhaps overweening 

 estimate of his own more living knowledge. This feeling, his sports- 

 man habits, the pleasant recollections of his boyhood in the forests of 

 Guiana, all contributed to make him dwell with pleasure on the 

 project of ransacking the yet unexplored regions of the earth in order 

 to drag to public view their feathered inhabitants. With this object 

 he quitted Paris, unknown to his friends, in July, 1780. He repaired 

 to Amsterdam, where he formed an intimate acquaintance with 

 Temminck ; and after five months spent in preparations, embarked, 

 in December, for the Cape of Good Hope, where he arrived in March, 

 1781. 



Le Vaillant remained in the colony till July, 1784. War had just 

 broken out between England , and Holland ; the vessels at the Cape 

 were ordered to Saldanha Bay, to conceal them from English cruisers : 

 Le Vaillant accompanied them. An English squadron discovered 

 their place of refuge, and the captain of the ship on board of which 

 Le Vaillant's travelling equipage was embarked, blew it up to prevent 

 its falling into the enemy's hands. Le Vaillant, thus stripped by an 

 accident of all the property he carried with him, was hospitably treated 

 by the colonists ; the fiscal Boers advanced everything that was neces- 

 sary to fit him out for the expeditions he contemplated, and the other 

 government officers did all in their power to promote his enterprise. 

 During the three years which he spent in the colony he made two 

 principal excursions. In the first, which occupied him from the 1 8th 

 of December, 1781, to the 2nd of April, 1782, he advanced westward, 

 at no great distance from the coast, to the Great Fish river ; ascended 

 its most western branch to the frontier of the Gonaquois and Caffres 

 (apparently near to where Beaufort now stands), and from thence 

 made an excursion into the country of the Caffres. He returned t>y a 

 more northerly route to Capo Town. His second excursion appears to 

 have commenced in April 1783, and lasted sixteen months: in this 

 time he advanced northward beyond the Orange river how far is 

 uncertain, probably not so far as the map which Laborde constructed 

 from his journals represents, but farther than his rival travellers 

 admit. On his return to the Cape, Le Vaillant contemplated a voyage 

 to Madagascar, but soon relinquished the idea, and embarked for 

 Europe on the 14th of July, 1784. In 1785 he returned to Paris. 



Le Vaillant's first care on returning to Europe was to arrange his 

 cabinet and prepare his journals for publication. The narrative of his 



