INTRODUCTION. 38 



compilation;, his merits were much fewer^ and his 

 absurdities more numerous than those of his prede- 

 cessor. Both were fond of the marvellous, but he 

 was eminently addicted to falsehood. 



During the long ages of barbarism that succeeded 

 the destruction of the Roman empire all the sciences 

 were lost. On the revival of learning some feeble 

 efforts were made to rescue natural history from 

 its degraded condition ; and at the commencement 

 of the sixteenth century appeared several works 

 on fishes, by Paolo Giovio, Pierre Belon, Rondelet^, 

 and Salviani. Belon wrote on birds also, and his 

 observations are remarkable considering the period 

 at which he lived. Conrad Gesner, a physician of 

 Zurich, in his History of Animals, presented a 

 compilation, arranged in alphabetical order, of all 

 that the ancients had left on the subject ; and Al- 

 drovandi, after the labour of sixty years, left be- 

 hind him an immense work on natural history, com- 

 prising no less than fourteen folio volumes. In the 

 seventeenth century, we find our own Ray and Wil- 

 lughby among the most successful students of na- 

 ture. Besides these celebrated individuals, there 

 were others, such as Jonston and Redi, who labour- 

 ed in the field of zoology; but perhaps the most 

 original authors of this period were Swammerdam 

 and Reaumur, whose minute observations, in ento- 

 mology especially, have not been excelled in accu- 

 racy by those of any subsequent writers. It was not, 

 however, until the middle of the eighteenth century, 

 that a new era was formed by the labours of Lin- 

 naeus, who was the first to collect all the known 

 productions of nature, to class them according to 

 simple principles derived from the observation of 



B 



