XV 



NATURAL HISTORY TO THE TIME OF LINN/EUS 



MODERN systematic botany and zoology are 

 usually held to have their beginnings with Lin- 

 naeus. But there were certain precursors of the fa- 

 mous Swedish naturalist, some of them antedating 

 him by more than a century, whose work must not 

 be altogether ignored such men as Konrad Gesner 

 (1516-1565), Andreas Caesalpinus (1579-1603), Fran- 

 cisco Redi (1618-1676), Giovanni Alfonso Borelli 

 (1608-1679), John Ray (1628-1705), Robert Hooke 

 (1635-1703), John Swammerdam (1637-1680), Mar- 

 cello Malpighi (1628-1694), Nehemiah Grew (1628- 

 1711), Joseph Tournefort (1656-1708), Rudolf Jacob 

 Camerarius (1665-1721), and Stephen Hales (1677- 

 1761). The last named of these was, to be sure, a con- 

 temporary of Linnseus himself, but Gesner and Caesal- 

 pinus belong, it will be observed, to so remote an epoch 

 as that of Copernicus. 



Reference has been made in an earlier chapter to 

 the microscopic investigations of Marcello Malpighi, 

 who, as there related, was the first observer who act- 

 ually saw blood corpuscles pass through the capillaries. 

 Another feat of this earliest of great microscopists was 

 to dissect muscular tissue, and thus become the father 

 of microscopic anatomy. But Malpighi did not con- 

 fine his observations to animal tissues. He dissected 



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