304 HISTORY OF ZOOLOGY. 



knowledge, was scarcely sought except in books, 

 and on that very account was not understood when 

 it was found. 



Period of Erudition. Better times at length 

 came, and men began to observe nature for them- 

 selves. The three great authors who are held to be 

 the founders of modern ichthyology, appeared in 

 the middle of the sixteenth century; these were 

 Belon, Rondelet, and Salviani, who all published 

 about 1555. All the three, very different from the 

 compilers who filled the interval from Aristotle to 

 them, themselves saw and examined the fishes which 

 they describe, and have given faithful representa- 

 tions of them. But resembling in that respect the 

 founders of modern botany, Brassavola, Ruellius, 

 Tragus, and others, they resembled them in this 

 also, that they attempted to make their own obser- 

 vations a commentary upon the ancient writers. 

 Faithful to the spirit of their time, they are far 

 more careful to make out the names which each 

 fish bore in the ancient world, and to bring toge- 

 ther scraps of their history from the authors in 

 whom those names occur, than to describe them in 

 a lucid manner ; so that without their figures, says 

 Cuvier, it would be almost as difficult to discover 

 their species as those of the ancients. 



The difficulty of describing and naming species so 

 that they can be recognized, is little appreciated at 

 first, although it is in reality the main-spring of the 

 progress of the sciences of classification. Aristotle 



