xviii FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



They harvested but did not thrash. Ostrich-like, their appetite was 

 greater than their power of digesting. A hasty judgment might 

 call them mere compilers, for they gathered all possible information 

 from all sources, but, on closer acquaintance, the encyclopaedists 

 grow upon one. Their industry was astounding, their ambition 

 lofty; and they prepared the way for men like Ray and Linnaeus, 

 in whom was the genius of order. 



Associated with this period there were many naturalist-travellers, 

 most of whom are hardly now remembered, save perhaps when we 

 repeat the name of some plant or animal which commemorates its 

 discoverer. Jose d'Acosta (d. 1600), a missionary in Peru, described 

 some of the gigantic fossils of South America; Francesco Hernanded 

 published about 1615 a book on the natural history of Mexico with 

 1200 illustrations; Marcgrav and Piso explored Brazil; Jacob Bontius, 

 the East Indies; Prosper Alpinus, Egypt; Belon, the Mediterranean 

 region; and there were many others. But it is useless to multiply 

 what must here remain mere citations of names. The point is 

 simply this, that, associated with the marvellous accumulative in- 

 dustry of the encyclopaedists and with the renaissance of zoology 

 in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were numerous 

 naturalist-travellers who described what they saw, and not what 

 they fancied might be seen. 



III. THE GENERAL NATURALIST TYPE. As Ray (d. 1705) and 

 Linnaeus (d. 1778) began to reduce to order the accumulations of 

 the encyclopaedists, and as the anatomists and physiologists began 

 the precise study of structure and function, the naturalist-travellers 

 became more definite in their aims and more accurate in their 

 observations. Linnaeus himself sent several of his pupils on pre- 

 cisely scientific journeys. Moreover, in the eighteenth century there 

 were not a few expeditions of geographical and physical purpose 

 which occasionally condescended to take a zoologist on board. 

 Thus Captain Cook was accompanied on his first voyage (1768- 

 1781) by Banks and Solander, and on his second voyage by the 

 Forsters, father and son. On his third voyage he expressly forbade 

 the intrusion of any naturalist, but from all that we can gather it 

 would have been better for himself if he had not done so. In 



