CHAPTER X. 
SIXTEENTH CENTURY (3rp Part). 
The Sixteenth Century (3rd part): 1544. William Turner. 1555. Conrad 
Gesner. The Solan Goose. 
William Turner, afterwards Dean of Wells.—No annals of 
ornithology would be complete without proper reference to the 
labours of William Turner, who has been called the Father of 
British Ornithology, for with the aid of this enquiring and in- 
dustrious man we may make some tolerable attempt to sketch 
the status of British birds in the sixteenth century. Whether 
Turner’s ornithological tastes continued in later life we are 
not told, but he was to the last a botanist. His reputation as 
a lover of birds rests on a small but very learned work, the 
“ Avium Praecipuarum, quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem 
mentio est, brevis & succincta historia,’ which is an attempt 
at identifying the birds given by these old writers. This vol- 
ume was printed at Cologne, in Germany, in the year 1544, 
and contains most valuable information about British and 
German birds, which, but for Turner, would not have come 
down to us. The great rarity of the original edition, and of 
Dr. Thackeray’s later one printed in 1823, have prevented 
the work from being generally known. Accordingly a new 
edition in 1903, with an excellent translation by Mr. A. H. 
Evans, was exceedingly acceptable to all ornithologists. * 
Dean Turner furnishes a contribution to the history of 
the Solan Goose, which, although well known, will bear quoting 
again from Mr. Evans’s translation. The Solan Goose, he 
tells us, evidently deriving his information from some original 
source, ‘. . . looks to its young with so much loving care 
that it will fight most gallantly with lads that are let down in 
baskets by a rope to carry them away, not without danger of 
* «Turner on Birds: A short and succinct History of the Principal 
Birds noticed by Pliny and Aristotle, first published by Dr. William Turner, 
1544.” Edited by A. H. Evans, 1903. 
