INTRODUCTION. xiii 



additions which he made were not in all 

 cases improvements. Other writers followed, 

 but their productions were of little value, 

 and it was not till the year 1544 that 

 William Turner published at Cologne what 

 Professor Newton describes as "the first 

 commentary on the birds mentioned by 

 Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like 

 the spirit that moves modern Naturalists." 

 Turner's book is very rare and unfortunately 

 at present beyond the reach of most modern 

 students. No attempt at systematic arrange- 

 ment, as now understood, was made until the 

 Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux of Pierre 

 Belon (Bellonius) appeared at Paris in 1555, 

 for the much greater work of Conrad Gesner, 

 being the third book of his Historia Animalium, 

 which was published at Zurich in the same 

 year, and treated of Birds, followed, more or 

 less closely, an alphabetical plan which brought 

 upon him the censure of Aldrovandus, three 

 of whose sixteen folio volumes forming the 

 Historia Naturalium bore the title of Orni- 



not actually to countenance, the fiendish cruelties perpetrated by their 

 unscrupulous allies. In matters which he considered less authoritative his 

 views were so liberal as to gain for him the stigma of infidel or heretic; 

 but let a man govern his thoughts and actions by the private rules Browne 

 laid down for his own guidance (vol. iv., p. 420), and it would be hard to 

 regard him as otherwise than a God-fearing man, striving to live up to his 

 profession. 



