"Or s'il en i a qui prennent les choses tant à la rigueur, qui ne veulent rien apparouver qui ne soit du tout parfait, je les prie de bien bon cueur de traiter telle, ou quelque autre histoire parfaitement, sans qu'il i ait chose quelconque à redire et la receverons é haut louerons bien vouluntiers. Cependant je scai bien, et me console . . . avec grand travail . . . qu'on pourra trouver plusieurs bones choses e dignes de louange ou proufit é contentement des homes studieux é à l'honneur é grandissime admiration des tres excellens é perfaits œuvres de Dieu."
And with the many "bones choses" of the work of Rondelet, men were too long satisfied, and it was not until the impulse of commerce had brought them face to face with new series of animals not found in the Mediterranean that the work of investigating fishes was again resumed. About 1640, Prince Moritz (Maurice) of Nassau (1604-79) visited Brazil, taking with him two physicians, Georg Marcgraf (1610-44) and Wilhelm Piso. In the great work "Historia Naturalis Brasiliæ," published at Leyden (1648), Marcgraf described about one hundred species, all new to science, under Portuguese names and with a good deal of spirit and accuracy. This work was printed by Piso after Marcgraf's death, and his colored drawings—long afterward used by Bloch—are in the "History of Brazil" reduced to small and crude woodcuts. This is the first study of a local fish fauna outside the Mediterranean region and it reflects great credit on Marcgraf and on the illustrious prince whose assistant he was.
There were no other similar attempts of importance in ichthyology for a hundred years, when Per Osbeck, an enthusiastic student of Linnæus, published (1757) the records of his cruise to China, under the name of "Iter Chinensis." At about the same time another of Linnæus' students, Fredrik Hasselquist, published, in his "Iter Palestinum" the account of his discoveries of fishes in Palestine and Egypt. More pretentious than these and of much value as an early record is Mark Catesby's (1679-1749) "Natural History of Carolina and the Bahamas," published in 1749, with large colored plates which are fairly correct except in those cases in which the drawing was made from memory.
At about the same time, Hans Sloane (1660-1752) published his large volume on the "Fishes of Jamaica," Patrick Browne (1720-90) wrote on the fishes of the same region, while Father Charles Plumier (1646-1704) made paintings of the fishes of Martinique, long after used by Bloch and Lacépède. Dr. Alexander Garden (1730-91), of Charleston, S. C., collected fishes for Linnæus, as did also Dr. Pehr Kalm in his travels in the northern parts of the American colonies.
With the revival of interest in general anatomy several naturalists took up the structure of fishes. Among these Günther mentions Borelli, Malpighi, Swammerdam, and Duverney. Other anatomists of later dates were Albrecht von Heller (1708-77), Peter Camper (1722-89), Felix Vicq d'Azyr (1748-94), and Alexander Monro (1783).
The basis of classification was first fairly recognized by John Ray (1628-1705) and Francis Willughby (1635-72), who, with other and varied scientific labors, undertook, in the "Historia Piscium," published in Oxford in 1686, to bring order out of the confusion left by their predecessors. This work, edited by Ray after Willughby's death, is ostensibly the work of Willughby with additions by Ray. In this work 420 species were recorded, 180 of which were actually examined by the authors, and the arrangement chosen by them pointed the way to a final system of nomenclature.
Direct efforts in this direction, with a fairly clear recognition of genera as well as species, were made by Lorenz Theodor Gronow, called Gronovius, a German naturalist of much acumen, and by Jacob Theodor Klein (1685-1757), whose work, "Historic Naturalis Piscium," published about 1745, is of less importance, not being much of an advance over the catalogue of Rondelet.
Far greater than any of these investigators, and earlier than either Klein or Gronow, was he who has been justly called the Father of Ichthyology, Petrus (Peter) Artedi (1705-35). Artedi was born in Sweden. He was a fellow student of Linnæus at Upsala, and he devoted his short life wholly to the study of fishes. He went to Holland to examine the collection of East and West Indian fishes of a rich Dutch merchant in Amsterdam named Albert Seba, and there at the age of twenty-nine he was, by accident, drowned in one of the Dutch canals. "His manuscripts were fortunately rescued by an Englishman, Cliffort," and they were edited and published by Linnæus in a series of five parts or volumes.
Artedi divided the class of fishes into orders, and these orders again into genera, the genera into species. The name of each species consisted of that of the genus with a descriptive phrase attached. This cumbersome system, called polynomial, used by Artedi, Gronow, Klein, and others, was a great advance on the shifting vernacular, of which it now took the place. But the polynomial method as a system was of short duration. Linnæus soon substituted for it the convenient, in fact inevitable binomial system which has now endured for 150 years, and which with certain modifications must form the permanent substructure of the nomenclature in systematic zoology and botany.
The genera of Artedi are in almost all cases natural groups, corresponding essentially equivalent to the families of to-day. Families in ichthyology were first clearly recognized and defined by Cuvier.