ON BIOLOGY. 5 



faults, present us with a view of the entire range of 

 science as it was understood at the time of his death. 



After the revival of learning in Europe, scientific 

 thought was still powerfully tinctured with 

 the teachings of the schools of Aris- 

 totle, of Galen, of Pliny and of their prede- 

 cessors, and their less distinguished contemporaries. 

 Indeed, from that epoch which saw the fall of the 

 Roman Empire down to the time I have just mentioned, 

 or to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, few were 

 those who contributed anything to the real progress of 

 the various sciences. Chief among them, perhaps, was 

 Albertus Magnus, who, born at Lavingen, in Suabia, in 

 1205, wrote a ''History of Animals," in twenty-one folio 

 volumes, which was published at Lyons in 1651. They 

 were almost entirely devoid of any original research, and 

 were otherwise quite Aristotelian in character. The 

 same strictures apply to the works of Paolo Giovio and of 

 Bock; the former, an Italian naturalist, wrote "De 

 Romanis Piscibus," which appeared in 1524, being dedi- 

 cated to the Cardinal of Bourbon; while the latter, gen- 

 erally known by the name of Tragus, published, in 1549, 

 a work entitled "KraeuterbucV von den vier Elementen, 

 Thieren, Yoegeln, und Fischen," which was stamped 

 with the same faults that characterized the productions 

 of the earlier writers upon the same subject. 



Passing through the Sixteenth Century, we still find 

 the same servile building upon the Aristotelian basis, 

 the same ignorance of the affinities of animals and plants, 

 and the same desire to more or less clothe the natural 

 with the supernatural. Almost an entire absence of any 

 orderly arrangement or classification of facts or forms 

 prevailed, schemes so essential to the true progress of all 

 knowledge. Slow digestion, however, was still going on, 

 and during this century the groundwork laid down by 

 the fathers in zoology and science was preserved by in- 

 dustrious hands, and by minds which, in some instances, 

 worked remarkably well when we come to consider the 

 times of their flourishing. During this epoch Salviani 

 and Rondelet proved themselves to be no mean ichthy- 

 ologists, who, with the physician Belon, of 

 France, really laid the cornerstone of the modern 

 science of ichthyology. It is rather a remarkable 

 fact that these three naturalists, working in the same 

 fields and so thoroughly independent of each other, 

 should have all flourished about the same time that is, 

 between 1553 and 1558. About the same time Conrad 



