XIV INTRODUCTION. 



t ho logics hoc est de Avibus Histories, Libri XII., 

 and were brought out at Bologna between 

 the years 1599 and 1603. The Historia 

 Naturalis of John Jonston, or " Jonstonus " 

 (1603-1675), originally published in four sections 

 between the years 1649 and 1653, ran through 

 several editions, and was a popular book in the 

 seventeenth century ; it is frequently referred 

 to by Browne, but is a work of very little 

 originality. Though all these authors un- 

 doubtedly influenced their successors, it may 

 be fairly said that it was Browne's contem- 

 poraries and fellow-countrymen, Francis 

 Will ugh by and John Ray, who laid the first 

 solid foundation of systematic zoology in 

 their Ornithologia and Historia Piscium, 

 published in 1676 and 1686 respectively; but 

 dying in 1682, Browne was indebted to neither 

 of them, though he doubtless exercised much 

 influence over them, and he had to use 

 the clumsy descriptive terminology then in 

 vogue.* Let me illustrate this by a single 

 example. In one of his letters to Merrett he 



* In 1735 appeared the first edition of the Systema Natura of Linnmus 

 which, meagre as it was, ushered in a more definite system of classifi- 

 cation, whilst his invention of the binomial method of nomenclature, first 

 used by him in the tenth edition of that work published in 1758, con- 

 tributed not a little in reducing to order what had hitherto been a. chaos, 

 although in his classification of birds he for the most part followed his 

 predecessor Ray. 



