74 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DISTANT LANDS 



Indies in 1598, conquered the Mauritius from the 

 Portuguese, and renamed it after their own Prince 

 Maurice. The narrative of the voyage, published in 

 1601, makes mention for the first time of the dodo, of 

 which a live specimen was brought home. Clusius was 

 able to copy a sketch made on board, and also to 

 describe a dodo's foot preserved at Ley den. An 

 apothecary of Leyden possessed the skin of a pangolin, 

 which Clusius figures under the name of "Lacertus 

 peregrinus spinosus." Though he calls it a lizard, he 

 mentions that some hairs were found on the body ; it 

 was not yet known that a few scattered hairs are the 

 infallible mark of a mammal. In the posthumous 

 Curce posteriores (1611) he tells how Johannes van 

 Ufele, a traveller in Brazil, showed him a book of 

 pictures of Brazilian animals and plants, coloured after 

 nature, and copied for him the drawings of the male 

 and female papaw, which are reproduced as woodcuts. 

 Clusius helped to spread the potato-plant in Flanders, 

 Austria and Germany ; the question of the first intro- 

 duction of the plant into Europe, about which much 

 has been written, is too complicated for discussion in 

 this place. ^ In co-operation with Busbecq and others, 

 he made the horse-chestnut, the lilac, the mock-orange, 

 the tulip and the common laurel, then called " the plum 

 of Trebizond," known to the gardeners of Europe. 



I 



The scientific gain which accrued from the multitude of 

 new species was not really so great as it appeared to be. 

 So vast and sudden an accession of facts overpowered 

 rather than strengthened the infant studies of zoologists 

 and botanists. Until the Systema Natures of Linnaeus 



1 The facts are recited by Dr. Daydon Jackson in the Gardener's Chronicle, 

 Mar. 17 and 24, 1900. 



