11. 



vegetable and mineral kingdoms. These two great men stand unrivalled as 

 the only philosophical naturalists of antiquity of whom we have any satis- 

 factory knowledge. 



Several ages after came Pliny, who has transmitted to us, so far as he was 

 able, all that was known of natural history at the time in which he lived. 

 Apollodorus, as Pliny informs us, was the first monographer of insects, since 

 he wrote a treatise upon scorpions, and described nine species. ^Elian also, 

 amongst other animals, mentions insects. From him we learn incidently that 

 artificial flies were sometimes used by Grecian anglers. 



From the time of Pliny and ^Elian, 1400 years rolled away, in which 

 scarcely anything was done or attempted for entomology or natural history in 

 general. During that long period the glimmer of only one luminary appeared 

 to make a short and feeble twilight. In the middle of the thirteenth century 

 Albertus Magnus devoted one out of twenty-one folio volumes to natural 

 history. He gives a very correct account of the pit-falls of the Ant Lion. 

 Insects he distinguishes by the name of Anulosa. He also calls them worms, 

 describing butterflies as flying worms*; and what is still more extraordinary, 

 the toad and the frog, which he includes amongst his Anulosa, he calls quad- 

 ruped- worms. 



After the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in the middle of the 

 fifteenth century, the light of learning, kindled by those of its professors who 

 escaped from that ruin, appeared in the West. The Greek language then 

 began to be studied universally ; and in consequence of the coeval invention 

 of the art of printing, various editions of the Greek works of the ancients 

 were published : amongst the rest, those of the fathers of natural history. 

 From the perusal of those works, the love of the sciences of which they treated 

 revived in the West, and the attention of scientific men began to direct itself 

 to the consideration and study of the works of their Creator. In the latter 

 part of that century, a work entitled the " Book of Nature " appeared in the 

 German language, in which animals and plants were treated of and rudely 

 figured, as they were likewise most miserably in " Cuba's Ortus Sanitatis/' 

 published in 1485. In this work, insects and crabs were described under 

 the three different denominations of Animals, Birds, and Fishes. Conrad 

 Gesner, the greatest naturalist the world had ever seen since Aristotle, was 

 born at Zurich, in 1516, and died in 1565. He founded and supported a 

 botanic garden, kept a painter engraver in his service, had a very considerable 

 library, and, according to Haller, was the first who ever formed a museum 

 of natural history. Ulysses Aldromandus resembled Gesner in the indefatig- 

 able industry and zeal for the advancement of natural history. His memory 



