CHAPTER XXVI.
HISTORY OF SOME OTHER PROVINCES OF LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.
Sect. I.
ON NATURAL HISTORY.
Zoology—Fabricius on Language of Brutes—Botany.
Aldrovandus. 1. The vast collections of Aldrovandus on zoology, though they may be considered as representing to us the knowledge of the sixteenth century, were, as has been seen before, only published in a small part before its close. The fourth and concluding part of his Ornithology appeared in 1603; the History of Insects in 1604. Aldrovandus himself died in 1605. The posthumous volumes appeared in considerable intervals: that on molluscous animals and zoophytes in 1606; on fishes and cetacea in 1613; on whole-hoofed quadrupeds in 1616; on digitate quadrupeds, both viviparous and oviparous, in 1637; on serpents in 1640; and on cloven-hoofed quadrupeds in 1642. There are also volumes on plants and minerals. These were all printed at Bologna, and most of them afterwards at Frankfort; but a complete collection is very rare.
Clusius. 2. In the Exotica of Clusius, 1605, a miscellaneous volume on natural history, chiefly, but not wholly, consisting of translations or extracts from older works, we find several new species of simiæ, the manis, or scaly ant-eater of the old world, the three-toed sloth, and one or two armadillos. We may add also the since extinguished race, that phœnix of ornithologists, the much-lamented dodo. This portly bird is delineated by Clusius, such as it then existed in the Mauritius.
Rio and Marcgraf. 3. In 1648, Piso on the Materia Medica of Brazil, together with Marcgraf’s Natural History of the same country, was published at Leyden, with notes by De Laet. The descriptions of Marcgraf are good, and enable us to identify the animals. They correct the imperfect notions of Gesner, and add several species which do not appear in his work, or perhaps in that of Aldrovandus: such as the tamandua, or Brasilian ant-eater; several of the family of cavies; the coati-mondi, which Gesner had perhaps meant in a defective description; the lama, the pacos, the jaguar, and some smaller feline animals; the prehensile porcupine, and several ruminants. But some, at least, of these had been already described in the histories of the West Indies, by Hernandez d’Oviedo, Acosta, and Herrera.
Jonston. 4. Jonston, a Pole of Scots origin, collected the information of his predecessors in a Natural History of Animals, published in successive parts from 1648 to 1652. The History of Quadrupeds appeared in the latter year. “The text,” says Cuvier, “is extracted, with some taste, from Gesner, Aldrovandus, Marcgraf, and Mouffet; and it answered its purpose as an elementary work in natural history, till Linnæus taught a more accurate method of classifying, naming, and describing animals. Even Linnæus cites him continually.”[640] I find in Jonston a pretty good account of the chimpanzee (Orang-otang Indorum, ab Angola delatus), taken perhaps from the Observationes Medicæ of Tulpius.[641] The delineations in Jonston being from copper-plates, are superior to the coarse wood-cuts of Gesner, but fails sometimes very greatly in exactness. In his notions of classification, being little else than a compiler, it may be supposed that he did not advance a step beyond his predecessors. The Theatrum Insectorum by Mouffet, an English physician of the preceding century, was published in 1634; it seems to be compiled in a considerable degree from the unpublished papers of Gesner and foreign naturalists, whom the author has rather too servilely copied. Haller, however, is said to have placed Mouffet above all entomologists before the age of Swammerdam.[642]
[640] Biogr. Univ.