Gardner ; Rise of the Literature of Entomology. 3 



whose life histories he sketches fairly correctly, and that Aristotle's 

 entomological knowledge has been greatly maligned. 



Passing from the Greeks to the Romans, the name of Pliny the 

 Elder figures as the great naturalist historian. He was a very ardent 

 student of Nature, and wrote several books on Natural History, one 

 of which (No. 11) is divided into 23 articles devoted to insects, which 

 however treat chiefly on bees ; these he holds as his fixed opinion 

 spring from certain flowers. Pliny met with his death during the 

 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii a.d. 79. 



YiRGiL, the great Latin elegiac poet, also wrote on bees, devoting 

 the whole of the fourth book of the Georgics to their economy. 

 Conceruiug their origin he says : 



" From herbs and fragrant flowers 

 They cull their young." 



— an idea much more poetical than correct. 



Beyond these two writers — with the exception perhaps of 

 Columella, who is supposed to have lived in the first century, and 

 who in his work on Agriculture devotes some attention to bees, no 

 further notice was taken of insects during the Roman era. After the 

 decline of the Roman empire all literature fell to a low ebb in Europe, 

 and, excepting by ^lian, Natural History was unnoticed and un- 

 thought of for a long period. tElian, a doctor, was born in Greece in 

 the twelfth century, and wrote a " Natural History of Animals," in 

 twenty-seven books, containing a short account of insects, which, 

 however, did not put forth anything new, merely quoting the opinions 

 of Aristotle and Pliny. Thus we may leap over a very long period, 

 extending from the first to the fifteenth century — 1500 years — 

 without finding anything new added to the history of Entomology. 



With the revival of learning, however, towards the end of the 

 middle ages, a few persons resumed the pursuit of Natural History. 

 Among these the foremost was Conrad Gesner, a man born of poor 

 parents at Zurich, a.d. 1516, but who seems to have been the most 

 apt and indefatigable of men. His various biographers are full of 

 admiration for his personal qualities, and his learning in all branches 

 seems to have been, as Hallam says, " simply prodigious." The same 

 author speaks of him as " probably the most comprehensive scholar of 

 his age." Gesner wrote on many subjects, yet his fame rests chiefly on 

 his almost incredible achievements in Natural History, on which he 

 wrote^many volumes, all illustrated by thousands of figures drawn by 

 his own hand from specimens in his collection, or executed under his 

 own eye by his assistants. His museum of animals, plants, fossils, 



