Gesner (Fig. 32) sacrificed his life to professional zeal during the prevalence of the plague in Zurich in 1564. Having greatly overworked in the care of the sick, he was seized with the disease, and died at the age of forty-nine.
Considered from the standpoint of descriptions and illustrations, Gesner's Historia Animalium remained for a long time the best work in zoölogy. He was the best zoölogist between Aristotle and John Ray, the immediate predecessor of Linnæus.
Fig. 32.—Gesner 1516-1565.
Jonston and Aldrovandi.—At about the same period as Gesner's work there appeared two other voluminous publications, which are well known—those of Jonston, the Scot (Historia Animalium, 1549-1553), and Aldrovandi, the Italian (Opera, 1599-1606). The former consisted of four folio volumes, and the latter of thirteen, of ponderous size, to which was added a fourteenth on plants. Jonston's works were translated, and were better known in England than those of Gesner and Aldrovandi. The wood-engravings in Aldrovandi's volume are coarser than those of Gesner, and are by no means so lifelike. In the Institute at Bologna are preserved twenty volumes of figures of animals in color, which were the originals from which the engravings were made. These are said to be much superior to the reproductions. The encyclopædic nature of the writings of Gesner, Aldrovandi, and Jonston has given rise to the convenient and expressive title of the encyclopædists.
Ray.—John Ray, the forerunner of Linnæus, built upon the foundations of Gesner and others, and raised the natural-history edifice a tier higher. He greatly reduced the bulk of publications on natural history, sifting from Gesner and Aldrovandi their irrelevancies, and thereby giving a more modern tone to scientific writings. He was the son of a blacksmith, and was born in southern England in 1628. The original form of the family name was Wray. He was graduated at the University of Cambridge, and became a fellow of Trinity College. Here he formed a friendship with Francis Willughby, a young man of wealth whose tastes for natural history were like his own. This association proved a happy one for both parties. Ray had taken orders in the Church of England, and held his university position as a cleric; but, from conscientious scruples, he resigned his fellowship in 1662. Thereafter he received financial assistance from Willughby, and the two men traveled extensively in Great Britain and on the Continent, with the view of investigating the natural history of the places that they visited. On these excursions Willughby gave particular attention to animals and Ray to plants. Of Ray's several publications in botany, his Historia Plantarum in three volumes (1686-1704) is the most extensive. In another work, as early as 1682, he had proposed a new classification of plants, which in the next century was adopted by Jussieu, and which gives Ray a place in the history of botany.
Fig. 33.—John Ray, 1628-1705.