6 BRITISH BIRDS. 



Berners. The early forest laws, and the different Acts 

 of ParHament enjoining the protection or destruction 

 of certain birds, may also be consulted with advantage, 

 but these necessarily include only a few species in their 

 enactments. 



Small as the knowledge of birds was in this country, it 



can hardly be said to have stood in better case in Continental 



Europe. There the study of natural history had made 



little or no advance smce the days of Aristotle and Pliny. 



It had been, in common with much else, enveloped and 



obscured in the intellectual gloom of the Middle Ages. 



Those few mediaeval writers who concerned themselves 



with the subject of natural history were content to derive 



their information from the great Greek and Latin authors 



of the classic age, and while attempting in no way to improve 



or elaborate such information, they rather, in the spirit of 



the age in which they wrote, disguised it with a mass of 



superstition and ignorance. It must, of course, be 



remembered that their books were chiefly written with a 



medicinal purpose, and that their object was to set forth 



the various strange curative properties which they ascribed 



to the component parts of the birds and beasts they 



mentioned, rather than to study or describe the animals 



themselves. Among the more prominent mediaeval authors 



who treated of birds at any considerable length, it may 



here suffice to mention the following : — ^Albertus Magnus 



(ob. 1282), whose twenty-six books, De Animalihus, were 



printed in 1478 ; Vicentius Belovacensis (ob. 1264), 



whose Speculum Nature was pubHshed at Strasburg about 



the same date ; and Bartholomew de Glanville, commonly 



known as Bartholomseus Anglius (fl. 1230-1255), from 



whose famous work, De Proprietatibus Berum, first printed 



at Basle, circa 1470, we can obtain a good idea of the 



general state of knowledge concerning natural history in 



the Middle Ages. Mention should also be made of a 



work entitled {H)Ortus Sanitatis, commonly ascribed to 



Johannes de Cuba, and published at Mainz in 1475. This, 



though professedly a herbal, deals in its third tractatus 



! 



