JOHN SWAM3IERDAM. 123 



vessels more easy to be traced in dissection, by in- 

 jecting them with coloured wax in a fluid state ; and 

 although he cannot for that reason alone claim all 

 the discoveries that have been made in anatomy, any 

 more than the first person who skinned birds can 

 claim the honour of determining the numerous species 

 that have been conveyed from distant countries, 

 or he who first cut a slice of petrified wood, all the 

 results that have emanated from his experiment, 

 yet he certainly devised the means of extending 

 our knowledge of the human body as well as of 

 pathology. His works on insects are the following : 

 —1. The General History of Insects, published 

 in Dutch at Utrecht in 1669, and subsequently in 

 French and Latin, in which he gives a classification 

 of these animals, founded on their structure and 

 metamorphoses. 2. The History of the Epheme- 

 ris, published in Dutch at Amsterdam in 1675, 

 and in Latin at London in 1681. 3. The Biblia 

 Naturae, sive Historia Insectorum in Classes Certas 

 Redacta, Leyden, 1737-38, 2 vols folio, which has 

 been translated into German, English, and French. 

 This important work was published after his death 

 by Boerhaave, in Dutch and Latin, and contains 

 a masterly exposition of the structure of such insects 

 as came under his observation. 



It has been remarked by an eminent entomologist, 

 that natural history, which, during the long series of 

 ages in which barbarism reigned, shared the fate of the 

 other sciences, underwent the same treatment when 

 a taste for knowledge began to revive. For example, 

 it was chiefly in Aristotle that the history of animals 

 was sought ; whereas, if Aldrovandi, Gesner, Moufet, 

 and other physiologists, had studied nature as much 



