n8 NATURAL SCIENCES. 



the wealthy, an encyclopaedia of natural history, filled with popular 

 stories and a mass of worthless erudition. This singular work, written in 

 Latin it was styled the "Liber de Proprietatibus Rerum" had a great 

 reputation so late as the sixteenth century ; it was translated into French by 

 Brother Jean Corbichon, under the amphibological title of " Proprietaire des 

 choses," at the request of King Charles V., and it was one of the works most 

 frequently published in different languages when printing was first invented. 

 A like honour was reserved for the treatises which Albert of Saxony, Bishop 

 of Halberstadt, had imitated after the analogous treatises of Aristotle and of 

 Albertus Magnus, and which enumerated the more or less problematical 

 properties of plants, minerals, and animals (Fig. 88). In the fifteenth 

 century a light shone upon the darkness of the natural sciences, and this 

 light was the art of designing, by which a precise and unvarying form was 

 given to the objects described. A German of the Rhine provinces, whose 

 very name has ' been forgotten, conceived the idea of executing a work of 

 natural history, embellished with paintings intended to illustrate the writer's 

 descriptions. This book, entitled "Das Buch der N"atur," was in reality an 

 abridged translation of Martin de Cantimpre's Latin work, " De Rcrum 

 Natura ; " but it contained a description of various animals, trees, and shrubs, 

 represented by figures, which in their drawing and colouring were very true 

 to nature. This book earned him such great celebrity that it was one of the 

 first books on natural history which the printing-press multiplied throughout 

 Germany as early as 1475, when the first edition appeared at Augsburg. 

 Wood engraving was henceforward the handmaiden of printing, and they 

 combined in offering to the eyes and to the mind some elementary 

 notions of the natural sciences. Printing, which, driven from its mys- 

 terious sanctuary by the siege and sack of Mayence (1462), had made its 

 way, with its typographers and engravers, into the great cities of Italy, 

 stimulated the rivalry of philologists and savants in bringing to light the 

 literary productions of ancient Greece and Rome. Aristotle, Theophrastus, 

 Dioscorides, and, still more, Pliny, at once found translators, commentators, 

 and editors. As early as the year 1468 John Spire published at Venice an 

 edition of Pliny ; the following year the German printers, Sweynheim and 

 Arnold Pannartz, published at Rome a new edition, also in folio, revised and 

 corrected by the great philologist, Andrew, Bishop of Aleria. Two years after- 

 wards a French printer settled at Venice, Nicholas Jenson, published an edition 



