DA YIJTCI. FRACASTORO. GESSKER. 29 



comparative shortness of his life, the variety and extent 

 of his attainments, and his proficiency in literature and 

 philology, as well as in medical and natural science, we 

 must acknowledge that while he resembled the immortal 

 Swede in the ardour and success of his inquiries, he may 

 be said to claim the pre-eminence for the wider range and 

 greater universality of his merits. His biography presents 

 events of considerable interest : born of poor parents, his 

 father being a furrier, he was assisted in completing his 

 education by his maternal uncle, Jean Prick, a minister, 

 who perceived his dawning genius, and instructed him in 

 literature and in botany as it was then known. But his 

 uncle having died, and his father being killed in the battle 

 of Zug, the youthful student saw himself compelled to seek 

 his fortune abroad, and to finish his studies by the aid of 

 charitable sympathy and private friendship. He was thus 

 indebted to the kindness of the canons of Zurich, and to a 

 young friend, a native of Bern, whose name, Jean Steiger, 

 well deserves a record. In the pursuit of knowledge, he 

 visited Strasburg, Paris, and Bourges, and returned to his 

 native place to assume the duties of a schoolmaster ; which 

 occupation, however, he quitted for the practice of medicine. 

 He subsequently became professor of Greek at the uni- 

 versity of Lausanne, obtained the degree of .doctor of medi- 

 cine at Bale, and continued to practise as a physician at 

 Zurich, pursuing his scientific labours in conjunction, with 

 the exercise of his profession. Having devoted his attention 

 to patients attacked with the plague, which then unhappily 

 prevailed, he perceived the symptoms of the malady on his 

 own person, and feeling the attack to be mortal, repaired to 

 his cabinet to arrange his papers, and calmly to await, like a 

 philosopher, the approach of death, which occurred on the 

 fifth day of the malady, in the prime of his life and powers, 

 in the forty-ninth year of his age. The pursuits of Gessner 

 were of the most varied and dissimilar kinds, and his emi- 

 nence undisputed in all. His favourite studies were phi- 

 lology and literary history, together with the theory and 

 practice of medicine, associated with the physical sciences 

 as far as they were then known, comprising the study of 

 botany, fossils, minerals, and geology. He was equally 

 skilled in the arts, and drew the illustrations for his various 



