20 MODERN HISTORY 



logy, are some of the subjects which he has successfully 

 illustrated*. 



No man entered the path of zoology with greater ardour, 

 or pursued it with more perseverance and success, than 

 Peter Simon Pallas, the son of a surgeon of Berlin. His 

 whole life indeed was only a succession of labours devoted 

 to the extension of natural knowledge. In passing over 

 the wide field of zoology, the student will see his name in 

 all quarters ; and everywhere as the index of some important 

 discovery. Should he wish to survey any part of the terri- 

 tory more minutely, Pallas will be his safest guide. He 

 published eighteen separate works, several of them bulky, 

 and in many volumes ; and he contributed fifty-five papers 

 to various learned societies f. When the value of writings 

 is so universally recognised, as in the case of a Haller 

 and a Pallas, their numerical amount is a measure of the 

 obligations under which science lies to their authors. He 

 acquired very rapidly the learned and the modern languages^ 

 and studied natural history, anatomy, physiology, and the 

 other branches of the medical profession, under the best 

 teachers that Germany and Holland afforded. His taste 

 for zoology was strongly marked at tlie age of fifteen, when 

 he sketched out an arrangement of birds on his own notions^ 

 and made observations on the larvae of the lepidoptera, 

 particularly with the view of determining whether they 

 possess the sense of hearing, which he settled in the affir- 

 mative. His Inaugural Thesis, De infestis viventlbus infra 

 viventla (that is. On animals which live in the bodies of 

 others), published in 1761, when he was nineteen years of 

 age, is still read with Information and pleasure ; although 

 the important subject, on which it treats, has received so 

 much additional light from the researches of subsequent 



* His various works are enumerated in the Notice de la Vie et des Ecrits 

 de. P. Camper, prefixed to the (Euvres, torn. i. 



f A short account of the Life of Pallas has been pviblished by his friend 

 RuDOLPHi, in his Beytrage zur Anthropologie und aUgemeinen Naturges- 

 chichte, 8vo. Berlin, 1812. It contains a complete catalogue of his numerous 

 writings. 



