The Natural History of Distant Lands (Sixteenth Century and Earlier).
Travel and commerce had made the ancient world familiar with many products of distant countries. Well-established trade routes kept Europe in communication with Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and India. Egyptians, Phœnicians, and Greeks explored every known sea, and brought to Mediterranean ports a variety of foreign wares. Under the Roman empire strange animals were imported to amuse the populace; silk, pearls, gay plumage, dyes, and drugs to gratify the luxury of the rich.
Long after the fall of the empire foreign trade was kept up along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Constantinople was still a great emporium. Silk was not only imported from the East, but cultivated around Constantinople in the sixth century. The cotton plant, the sugarcane, the orange tree, and the lemon tree gradually spread northward and westward until they became established in Italy, Spain, and the islands of the Mediterranean.
Western Europe had during many centuries little share in this commerce. The large and conspicuous animals of Africa and Asia, such as the elephant, camel, camelopard, ostrich, pelican, parrot, and crocodile, would have passed out of knowledge altogether but for chance mention in the Bible and the Bestiaries. Little was done to supplement native food-plants and drugs by imported products, and the knowledge of foreign vegetation became as indistinct as that of foreign animals.
In the thirteenth century communication between Western Europe and the far East was restored. China was thrown open by the Tartar conquest, and Marco Polo was able to reach the court of Khan Kublai. Pilgrims from the Holy Land brought back information which, however scanty it might be, was eagerly received. One of the earliest printed books (1486) contains the travels of Bernard of Breydenbach, a canon of Mainz, whose narrative is adorned by curious woodcuts, in which we can make out a giraffe and a long-tailed macaque.
The geographical discoveries of the sixteenth century gave men for the first time a fairly complete notion of the planet which they inhabit. Circumnavigators proved that it is really a globe. Maps of the world, wonderfully exact considering the novelty of the information which they embodied, were engraved as early as 1507. The explorers of America busied themselves not only with the preparation of charts, the conquest of Mexico and Peru, the search for gold, and the spread of the true faith, but also with the strange animals and plants which they saw; and the news which they brought back was eagerly received in Europe. Queen Isabella charged Columbus, when he set out for his second voyage, to bring her a collection of bird-skins; but this may be rather a proof of her love of millinery than of her interest in natural history. Pope Leo X. liked to read to his sister and the cardinals the Decades of Peter Martyr Anglerius,[3] in which the productions of the New World are described. The opossum, sloth, and ant-eater, the humming-bird, macaw, and toucan, the boa, monitor, and iguana, were made known for the first time. Potatoes and maize began to be cultivated in the south of Europe, the tomato was a well-known garden plant, the prickly pear was spreading along the shores of the Mediterranean, and tobacco was largely imported. By the end of the seventeenth century Mirabilis and the garden Tropæolum had been brought from Peru, the so-called African marigold from Mexico, and sunflowers from North America. More than a hundred years had still to run before the evening primrose, the passion flower, and the lobelias of America were to become familiar to European gardeners, ipecacuanha and cinchona to European physicians.