354 The Study of Animal Life app. 



the lizard which recovers its sight by looking at the sun, the eagle 

 which renews its youth, the tortoise mistaken for an island, the 

 serpent afraid of naked man, and the most miserable ant-lion, 

 which is not able either to take one kind of food or digest the 

 other. 



(5) But delight in romance is replaced by a feeling of the need 

 for definite knowledge, and the earlier years of adolescent man- 

 hood and womanhood are often very markedly characterised by a 

 thirst and hunger for information. Which of us — now perhaps 

 blasi with too much learning — does not recall the enthusiasm for 

 knowing which once swayed our minds ? Stimulated in a hundred 

 ways by new experiences and responsibilities, our appetite for facts 

 was once enormous. This was the mood of naturalists during the 

 next great period in the history of zoology. 



The freer circulation of men and thoughts associated with the 

 Crusades ; the discovery of new lands by travellers like Marco 

 Polo and Columbus ; the founding of universities and learned 

 societies ; the establishment of museums and botanic gardens ; the 

 invention of printing and the reappearance of Aristotle's works in 

 dilution and translation ; and many other practical, emotional, and 

 intellectual movements gave fresh force to science, and indeed to 

 the whole life of man. If we pass over some connecting links, 

 such as Albertus Magnus in the thirteeenth century, we may call 

 the period of gradual scientific renaissance that of the Encyclo- 

 pEedists. This somewhat cumbrous title suggests the omnivorous 

 habits of those early workers. They were painstaking collectors 

 of all information about all animals ; but their appetite was 

 greater than their digestion, and the progress of science was 

 in quantity rather than in quality. Prominent among them were 

 these four, the Englishman Edward Wotton (1492- 1555), who 

 wrote a treatise De Differentiis Aninialium ; the Swiss Conrad 

 Gesner (1516-65), author of a well-known Historia Animalium ; 

 the Italian Aldrovandi (b. 1522); and the Scotsman Johnston 

 (b. 1603). 



About the middle of the eighteenth century the best aims of the 

 Encyclopsedists were realised in Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, which 

 appeared in fifteen volumes between 1749 and 1767. This work 

 not only describes beasts and birds, the earth and man, with an 

 eloquent enthusiasm which was natural to the author and pleasing 

 to his contemporaries, but is the first noteworthy attempt to 

 expound the history or evolution of animals. Its range was very 

 wide ; and its successors are not so much single books as many 

 different kinds of books, on geology and physical geography, on 

 classification and physiology, on anthropology and natural history. 

 There is a good French edition of Buffon's complete works by 



