Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/13

ORNITHOLOGY as he tells us, predecessors ; and, looking to that portion of his works on animals which has come down to us, one finds that, though more than 170 sorts of Birds are mentioned, 1 yet what is said of them amounts on the whole to very little, and this consists more of desultory observations in illustration of his general remarks (which are to a con siderable extent physiological or bearing on the subject of reproduction) than of an attempt at a connected account of Birds. Some of these observations are so meagre as to have given plenty of occupation to his many commentators, who with varying success have for more than three hundred years been endeavouring to determine what were the Birds of which he wrote ; and the admittedly corrupt state of the text adds to their difficulties. One of the most recent of these commentators, the late Prof. Sundevall equally proficient in classical as in ornithological knowledge was, in 1863, compelled to leave more than a score of the Birds unrecognized. Yet it is not to be supposed that in what survives of the great philosopher s writings we have more than a fragment of the knowledge possessed by him, though the hope of recovering his Zo>t/ca or his Avaro/xtKa, in which he seems to have given fuller descriptions of the animals he knew, can be hardly now entertained. A Latin transla tion by Gaza of Aristotle s existing zoological work was printed at Venice in 1503. Another version, by Scaliger, was subsequently published. Two wretched English trans lations have appeared. Pliny. Next in order of date, though at a long interval, comes CAIUS PLINIUS SECUNDUS, commonly known as PLINY the Elder, who died A.D. 79, author of a general and very dis cursive Historia Naturalis in thirty-seven books, of which Book X. is devoted to Birds. A considerable portion of Pliny s work may be traced to his great predecessor, of whose information he freely and avowedly availed himself, while the additions thereto made cannot be said to be, on the whole, improvements. Neither of these authors attempted to classify the Birds known to them beyond a very rough and for the most part obvious grouping. Aristotle seems to recognize eight principal groups : (1) Gampsonyches, approximately equivalent to the Accipitres of Linnasus ; (2) Scolecophaga, containing most of what would now be called Oscines, excepting indeed the (3) Acanthophaga, composed of the Goldfinch, Siskin, and a few others ; (4) Scnipophaga, the Woodpeckers ; (5) Peristeroi.de, or Pigeons ; (6) Schizopoda, (7) Steganopocla, and (8) Barea, nearly the same respectively as the Linna^an Grallse, Ansercs, and Gallinse. Pliny, relying wholly on characters taken from the feet, limits himself to three groups without assigning names to them those which have " hooked tallons, as Hawkes ; or round long clawes, as Hennes ; or else they be broad, flat, and whole-footed, as Geese and all the sort in manner of water-foule " to use the words of Philemon Holland, who, in 1601, published a quaint and, though condensed, yet fairly faithful English translation of Pliny s work. ^Elian. About a century later came ^ELIAN, who died about A.D. 140, and compiled in Greek (though he was an Italian by birth) a number of miscellaneous observations on the peculiarities of animals. His work is a kind of common place book kept without scientific discrimination. A con siderable number of Birds are mentioned, and something said of almost each of them ; but that something is too often nonsense according to modern ideas though occasionally a fact of interest may therein be found. It contains numerous references to former or contemporary writers whose works have perished, but there is nothing to shew that they were wiser than yElian himself. 1 Tliis is Sundevall s estimate ; Drs Aubert and Wimmer in their excellent edition of the lo-ropiai irepl ipcav (Leipzig : 1868) limit the number to 126. The twenty-six books De Animalibus of ALBERTUS Albe MAGNUS (GKOOT), who died A.D. 1282, were printed in Mag: 1478 ; but were apparently already well known from manu script copies. They are founded on the works of Aristotle, many of whose statements are almost literally repeated, and often without acknowledgment. Occasionally Avicenna, or some other less-known author, is quoted ; but it is hardly too much to say that the additional information is almost worthless. The twenty-third of these books is De Avibus, and therein a great number of Birds names make their earliest appearance, few of which are without interest from a philologist s if not an ornithologist s point of view, but there is much difficulty in recognizing the species to which many of them belong. In 1485 was printed the first dated copy of the volume known as the Ortus Sanitatis, to the popularity of which many editions testify. Though said by its author, JOHANN WONNECKE VON CAUB Cube (Latinized as JOHANNES DE CUBA), 2 to have been composed from a study of the collections formed by a certain noble man who had travelled in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Egypt possibly Breidenbach, an account of whose travels in the Levant was printed at Mentz in 1486 it is really a medical treatise, and its zoological portion is mainly an abbreviation of the writings of Albertus Magnus, with a few interpolations from Isidorus of Seville (who flour ished in the beginning of the seventh century, and w r as the author of many works highly esteemed in the Middle Ages) and a work known as PHYSIOLOGUS (q.v.). The third trac- tatus of this volume deals with Birds including among them Bats, Bees, and other flying creatures; but as it is the first printed book in which figures of Birds are introduced it merits notice, though most of the illustrations, which are rude woodcuts, fail, even in the coloured copies, to give any precise indication of the species intended to be repre sented. The scientific degeneracy of this work is mani fested as much by its title (Ortus for Hortus) as by the mode in which the several subjects are treated ; 3 but the revival of learning was at hand, and WILLIAM TURNER, a Turn Northumbrian, while residing abroad to avoid persecution at home, printed at Cologne in 1544 the first commentary on the Birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern naturalists. 4 In the same year and from the same press was issued a Dialogus de Avibus by GYBERTUS LONGOLIUS, and in 1570 Long CAIUS brought out in London his treatise De rariorum nus - animalium atque stirpium historia. In this last work, small though it be, ornithology has a good share ; and all three may still be consulted with interest and advantage by its votaries. 5 Meanwhile the study received a great impulse from the appearance, at Zurich in 1555, of the third book of the illustrious CONRAD GESNER S Historia Animalium Gesn "qvi est de Auium natura," and at Paris in the same year - On this point see G. A. Pritzel, Botan. Zeitung, 1846, pp. 785-790, and Thes. Literal. Botanica (Lipsise : 1851), pp. 349-352. 3 Absurd as much that we find both in Albertus Magnus and the Ortus seems to modern eyes, if we go a step lower in the scale and consult the Bestiaries" or treatises on animalswhich were common from the twelfth to the fourteenth century we shall meet with many more absurdities. See for instance that by PHILIPPE DE THAUN (PHILIPPUS TAOXENSIS), dedicated to Adelaide or Alice, queen of Henry I. of England, and pro bably written soon after 1121, as printed by the late Mr Thomas Wright, in his Popular Treatises on Science written during the Middle Ages (London: 1841). 4 This was reprinted at Cambridge in 1823 by the late Dr George Thackeray. 5 The Seventh of WoTTON s De differentiis animalium Libri Decem, published at Paris in 1552, treats of Birds; but his work is merely a compilation from Aristotle and Pliny, with references to other classical writers who have more or less incidentally mentioned Birds and other animals. The author in his preface states "Veterum scriptorum sententias in unum quasi cumulum eoaceruaui, de meo nihil addidi." Nevertheless he makes some attempt at a systematic arrangement of Birds, which, according to his lights, is far from despicable.