20 PERIOD I. 



n 



and obsolete names of dogs, reward the reader of this 

 short tract. 



Thomas Moufet wrote (for Gesner again) a book on 

 insects, which incorporated the notes of Penny and 

 Wotton. None of the three lived to see the printed 

 book, which was at last put forth by Sir Thomas 

 Mayerne in 1634. It is uncritical, confused, and illus- 

 trated by the rudest possible woodcuts. 



John Gerarde's Herbal (1597) and Parkinson's two 

 books of plants are more amusing than valuable. Both 

 authors were guilty of unscrupulous plagiarism, a vice 

 which cannot be atoned for by curious figures and bits 

 of folk-lore, nor even by command of Shakespearean 

 English. Thomas Johnson's edition of Gerarde (1633) 

 is a far better book than the original ; Ray called it 

 "Gerarde emaculatus" — i.e.^ freed from its stains. 



The succession of influential English naturalists may 

 be said to begin with Ray, Willughby, and Martin 

 Lister, all of whom belong to the last half of the 

 seventeenth century. 



The Rise of Experimental Physiology. 



1543 is a memorable year in the history of science. 

 Then appeared the treatise of Copernicus on the 

 Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies^ completed long 

 before, but kept back for fear of the cry of novelty 

 and absurdity which, as he explains in his preface, 

 dull men, ignorant of mathematics, were sure to raise. 

 The aged astronomer, paralysed and dying, was able 

 to hold his book in his hands before he passed away. 

 In the same year Vesalius, a young Belgian anatomist, 

 published his Structure of the Human Body^ a volume 

 rich in facts ascertained by dissection. Some of these 

 facts were held to contradict the teaching of Galen. 



