30 HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE. 



works with a fidelity and skill which have frequently been 

 acknowledged and admired. His most important literary 

 production is his Bibliotheca Universalis, or catalogue of all 

 known authors in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, a work of 

 immense learning and labour ; as well as his Mitkridates, a 

 philological performance, in which we find the Lord's Prayer 

 in the twenty-two languages with which, like the monarch 

 after whom his treatise is entitled, he was acquainted. He 

 farther edited a great number of classic authors, and we owe 

 to him the first translation of ./Elian. His most valued per- 

 formance in natural history is his Historia Animalium, which 

 may be regarded as the foundation of modern zoology ; while, 

 as a botanist, he was the first to arrange plants in the order 

 of classes, genera, and species, and thus to raise this study to 

 a system. His work De Rebus Fossilibus contains figures of 

 many fossils well represented : he does not appear to have 

 decided whether these objects were the remains of living 

 beings, or were produced by natural forces ; opinions which 

 divided the savans of Europe for more than a century after 

 his death. His personal character was as amiable as his 

 philosophical attainments were eminent; pious and pure, 

 gentle and unassuming, he was equally admired and beloved. 



BERNARD PALISST, born in the diocese of Age, in France, 

 in 1499, was among the first who maintained that fossil 

 shells found in rocks were the remains of marine animals ; 

 he argued from the state of preservation in which they were 

 discovered, with their most delicate spines and processes 

 preserved, that they could not have been transported from a 

 distance by an inundation of water, but must have lived and 

 died on the spot where they were found. 



This idea formed the germ of the great truths which 

 subsequent discoveries have more fully unfolded. Paleonto- 

 logy, thus born on the soil of Erance, has ever been most 

 largely indebted for its advancement to her distinguished 

 philosophers. It is, also, to Palissy that agriculture is 

 indebted for the discovery of the use of marl as a mineral 

 manure. 



The progress of natural history in Italy may be estimated 

 from the taste which arose towards the close of the sixteenth 

 century, for forming and describing collections. The richest 

 then existing in Italy, as we are informed by Brocchi, was 



