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Cuvier’s History of the Natural Sciences

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Georges Cuvier

2. European Travelers and the Early Dutch Naturalists

6. Contributions of the Early Dutch Naturalists

Testo integrale

Elephant
Plate from Jonston’s Historia naturalis… (1640) Cliché Bibliothèque centrale, MNHN.

1Messieurs,

  • 1 [For Hernández, see Lesson 5, note 78.]
  • 2 [Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (born 14 September 1769, Berlin; died 6 May 185 (...)
  • 3 [Obviously, Cuvier means to refer here to “New Spain,” formally called the Viceroyalty of New Spai (...)

2During our last session, I gave you a presentation of the geographic discoveries and of the first European settlements in faraway countries. I showed you what benefit they brought to natural history and I gave you the names of the primary authors who, since these early times, had started to incorporate the wealth of these discoveries in their works. First, we talked about the Spanish authors since their settlements were the first ones to be created in the countries they had conquered. The main author among all of them remains Hernández1 because he was the first one to introduce us to the plants and animals of Mexico, and who, most importantly, included illustrations, which were almost indispensable at a time when the descriptions were so imperfect that, without any illustrations, they would have been almost impossible to understand. Hernández is even more important since two centuries after the publication of his work, nothing new had been reported on the countries he described; it is only recently that Monsieur de Humboldt2 and a few other travelers were able to enter Old Spain3 and give us some information about it. The other areas of America were described only later, some by the French, some by the Dutch.

  • 4 [Cuvier means to say “1763,” in referring here to the Treaty of Paris, also known as the Peace of (...)
  • 5 [The Admiral of Coligny is Gaspard II de Coligny (born 16 February 1519, Châtillon-sur-Loing; died (...)
  • 6 [Persecution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of members of the Protestant Reformed (...)
  • 7 [Nicolas Durand, Sieur de Villegaignon (born 1510, Villegaignon, Seine et Marne, France; died 9 Ja (...)
  • 8 [Fort Coligny, a fortress founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (see note 7, above) in Rio de (...)

3There is not much left of the French settlements in America, especially in South America; in North America they remained for a longer period of time since France lost ownership of them with the Peace of 1663.4 But, as early as the sixteenth century, some had tried to establish settlements in Brazil; especially the Admiral of Coligny5 who was the first to have this idea. He wanted to send over there several Protestant families to protect them from the persecutions Protestants experienced during part of the sixteenth century.6 A knight from Malta named Villegaignon7 took the responsibility to take them there; several French citizens who thought they could bring back their fortune by establishing trading posts in faraway countries joined them on the trip. They left in 1555; first they arrived in the area of Brazil where the town of Rio de Janeiro is now located and they created a fort that was named Coligny.8 They had already dealt with the savages of the area, established some kind of trade, and started agriculture when dissension occurred in the settlement. Villegaignon converted to Catholicism and sent his Protestant mates away. Three of them shipwrecked and as the current sent them back toward the coast, he ordered them to be thrown back at sea. So, after a short while, all the French runaways who had remained in this country were victim to either the climate, the savages, or the Portuguese who were quite happy to oust them away from their own settlements. In spite of its short existence, the French colony of Brazil produced two small books that still have a place among the books on natural history of that time.

  • 9 [André de Thevet (born 1516, Angoulême; died 23 November 1590, Paris), a French Franciscan priest, (...)
  • 10 [Gyllius is Pierre Gilles, also known as Pierre Alby; see Lesson 3, notes 15 and 26, above; and Vo (...)
  • 11 [Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique: & de plusieurs terre & isle (...)
  • 12 [Laporte is Maurice de la Porte (born 1531, Paris; died 23 April 1571, Paris), a French lexicograp (...)
  • 13 [La cosmographie universelle d’André Thevet, cosmographe du roy: illustrée de diverses figures des (...)
  • 14 [Jean de Léry (born 1536, Lamargelle, Côte-d’Or, France; died 1613), a French explorer, writer, an (...)
  • 15 The actual title of de Léry’s book is Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, autrement d (...)
  • 16 [The Count of Coligny is François de Coligny (born 1557, died 1591), a French Protestant general o (...)

4The first one is from André de Thevet,9 born in Angouleme, who, before he left for Brazil with Villegaignon, had traveled with Gyllius10 to Greece and the Levant. He stayed in America for only three months, but this short time was enough to enable him to gather material for a small book called Singularitez de la France Antarctique, printed in Antwerp in 1558, in octavo.11 It includes woodcut figures of some of the most unique plants and animals of Brazil. Among these illustrations are the first ever made of the sloth and of the pineapple. This small work was done by a man who was rather ignorant and who was perhaps not even able to write it himself in French since it was written by a man named Laporte.12 After he published this book, Thevet became a Franciscan friar. Apparently while in this Order, he gained new knowledge since, in 1577, nineteen years after his first work, he published a general cosmography in which he talks very badly about his mates from Brazil.13 The way he talked about them in his book led one of them to respond; it was Jean de Léry,14 born in 1534 in the village of Lamargale in Burgundy, who was one of the Protestant ministers that the Admiral of Coligny had chosen for his colonization. He had stayed about eighteen months in America since he left around 1556 and came back in 1558; however, his work was not published until 1578, twenty years after his return. It is called Travel to America with the description of the animals and the plants of this country and was published in Rouen.15 It is dedicated to the Count of Coligny,16 the son of the Admiral of Coligny who was at that time governor of Montpellier. Léry does not seem to have been more educated than Thevet. The reason why I talk about their works is more to not forget them than for their contribution to science, because they are the only books written by the French at the time.

  • 17 [Philip II, see Lesson 2, note 1.]
  • 18 [Johan Maurits (born 17 June 1604, Dillenburg; died 20 December 1679, Cleves), Count and later (fr (...)
  • 19 [Dutch West India Company, a chartered company (known as the WIC) of Dutch merchants. On 3 June 16 (...)
  • 20 [Joannes or Johannes de Laet (born 1581, Antwerp; buried 15 December 1649, Leiden), a Dutch geogra (...)
  • 21 [Willem Piso (born 1611, Leiden; died 28 November 1678, Amsterdam), a Dutch physician and naturali (...)
  • 22 [Georg Marcgrave (born 1610; died 1644, Guinea), a German naturalist and astronomer, proficient as (...)
  • 23 [A nickname originating from Liebstadt, a town in the Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge district, i (...)
  • 24 [Cranitz is Henri Cralitz, a young German student who was sent, along with Georg Marcgrave (see no (...)
  • 25 [Johan Maurits, see note 18, above.]
  • 26 [Frederick William (born 16 February 1620, Berlin; died 29 April 1688, Potsdam), Elector of Brande (...)
  • 27 [The Royal Library of Berlin is now the Berlin State Library, one the largest libraries in Europe (...)

5It is a different story with the Dutch of the next century; I say next century because the Dutch writings on America came more than sixty years later. You saw how after the insurrection of the United Provinces against Spain, Philip II, the king of Spain,17 who had become leader of Portugal, forbade them to enter the port of Lisbon, thus preventing the Dutch merchants access to the merchandise from India and America that they shipped to the various northern countries. As a result, the Dutch organized their own expeditions to both Indias. I also told you how they drove the Portuguese out of their settlements in the West Indies in the beginning of the seventeenth century. A little later, they also attacked the Portuguese possessions in America and in 1629 they took over Olinda, capital of the province of Pernambuco. Sixty years earlier, France had established itself in the southern part of this province. The Dutch established themselves in the northern part. The government of this settlement was entrusted to Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen,18 by the company that had organized the expedition since usually all the conquests by the Dutch, the English, and the French were done by private companies, not by their government as it was the case for the Spanish and the Portuguese. Thus, even today the places where the Dutch and the English settled belong to these companies, not to their home country. The West India Company,19 as it was called, sent, as I said earlier, Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau, to the Province of Pernambuco. The director of this company in Europe was Johannes de Laet,20 born in Antwerp about 1590. He was a very knowledgeable man who wrote several books that I will talk about later. De Laet appointed Willem Piso of Leiden,21 who was a physician in Amsterdam, as doctor of the colony that the Count of Nassau governed as per the colony’s appointment. Piso was accompanied by two German colleagues who were also sent by de Laet—I mention it because it was the first expedition of natural history to be carried out successfully. One of them was Georg Marcgrave,22 with the nickname of Liebstadt;23 he was born in Meissen, in Saxony, in 1610. The other man was Henri Cranitz24 who died very early in the trip; but Marcgrave remained in Brazil for several years and died only during his trip to Guinea where he had gone to expand his knowledge and to look for plants and other natural productions that could have been useful to the new colony. Count Maurits25 sent his work to the government, which took care of its publication. This work included two collections of paintings made with great care. One was in oil and the other in watercolors. These two collections were sold after they were used to create the illustrations for the books on Marcgrave and Piso’s research. They were bought by Count Maurits who, after he had left the government of the Dutch colony in Brazil in 1644, worked for the Elector of Brandenburg,26 then became governor of Wesel and later governor of Berlin where he was anointed Prince. He died in Berlin in 1679. The two collections of paintings that he had bought remained in that town and are still there today in the Royal Library of Berlin where they can be compared with de Laet’s publications.27 It is a noteworthy circumstance since it is quite rare to find in perfect condition a book that old and still very precious today for it is of much higher quality than the woodcut engravings of that time.

  • 28 [Historia naturalis Brasiliae, auspicio et beneficio illustriss. I. Mauritii com. Nassau illius pr (...)
  • 29 [Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Aldrovandi, and Gessner, the Renaissance zoologists; see Lesson 3.]
  • 30 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, see Volume 1, Lesson 7, note 39.]
  • 31 De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim, quorum contenta pagina sequens exhibe (...)

6For the publication of this beautiful work, de Laet hired the physician that was Marcgrave’s colleague, Willem Piso. The book was first published in 1648, with the title Historia naturalis Brasiliae.28 It is a one-volume folio in two parts. The first part is about medicine in Brazil and describes observations related to hygiene that Piso had written, with the hope the information would be useful to the colonies and to those who would manage the colony in the future. The second part is about the natural history of Brazil, entirely done by Marcgrave, with illustrations engraved on wood, based on the originals lent by Count Maurits. Among the books that had been published until then, his work is without doubt the one that has the most refined descriptions; the objects are named with the most discernment and the illustrations are the best designed. It is even considered to be a book of reference that can be read with trust in every aspect. However, since the naturalists had not reached the level of detail that would include a wealth of small characteristics such as the stamen and pistil in the flowers, all the parts of the mouth in the insects, and the spines of the fins in the fishes, one does not find such delicate observations in Marcgrave’s work; but everything related to the size, shape, color, and most particularly, everything related to its domestic and medicinal use is noted with great accuracy and great care. Marcgrave was actually very educated; he knew well the works of Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Aldrovandi, and Gessner;29 it is even said that he took their books with him on his travels. He categorized the species that he discovered in the genera they belong, with discernment and care. Basically his work could be considered a masterpiece. It has only been in the last fifteen years that numerous voyages, which have been organized and paid for by the governments, have resulted in more substantial works. Until then, Marcgrave’s book was the work of reference in which all naturalists found their information. Buffon30 cites him constantly; even botanists cite him more often than Hernández about the natural history of plants of Mexico, although the part that is of interest to them is the one that is the least useful, because herbariums make up for books. Marcgrave died in 1644 in Guinea, as I said earlier, and he did not have the pleasure to publish his book himself —Piso did it for him. But this physician published a little later, in 1658, a new edition of his own book called De Indiae utriusque re maturali et medica.31 He expanded the medical section of his first volume and shortened the part by Marcgrave. He organized it differently; all the information that Marcgrave had provided on plants and animals was not organized by class as Marcgrave had done it, but according to medical consideration: in one section, the edible products; in the second, the poisonous products; and in a third part, medicinal substances. As a result, some authors who had not read both editions of Piso considered him to be a plagiarist of Marcgrave, which is not the case since in his preface and all over his book, he praises him as his former colleague and credits him in such a way that it is impossible to say that he tried to make Marcgrave’s work his own.

  • 32 [Passiflora, known also as the passion flowers or passion vines, a genus of about 500 species of f (...)
  • 33 [Anacardium, a genus of flowering plants of the family Anacardiaceae, native to tropical regions o (...)
  • 34 [Manioc, also called Cassava, a species (Manihot esculenta) of woody shrub of the Euphorbiaceae (s (...)
  • 35 [Ipecacuanha, the common name for Carapichea ipecacuanha, a species of flowering plant of the Rubi (...)
  • 36 [Toco is the Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco), also known as the Toucan or Common Toucan, the largest (...)
  • 37 [Kamichi, also called the Horned Screamer (Anhima cornuta), a large South American bird, character (...)
  • 38 [Cariama, also known as the Red-legged Seriema (Cariama cristata), a large, long-legged, crane-lik (...)
  • 39 [Coendou or coendous, prehensile-tailed porcupines of the genus Coendou, found in Central and Sout (...)
  • 40 [Cavia is the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus), also called the cavy, a species of rodent belonging to (...)
  • 41 [Agouti refers to a number of species of Central and South American rodents, whose fur contains a (...)
  • 42 [Alouatta, a genus containing the fifteen recognized species of howler monkeys, which are among th (...)
  • 43 [The Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), once the most numerous tiger subspecies, its pop (...)
  • 44 [An apparent allusion to the modern-day theory of plate tectonics and continental drift, not widel (...)

7These two books brought to knowledge a whole wealth of new natural productions. Many curious plants are featured, such as the pineapple, the cacti, Passiflora,32 Anacardium,33 manioc,34 and ipecacuana.35 Many plants around Brazil are also described with enough details to make them easy to identify; but they are not yet the object of our study; we will go back to them when we study the history of botany. For now, we will focus on some species of animals native to these countries that were introduced for the first time: among the birds are the toco;36 the kamichi, a large bird with sharp spurs on each wing;37 the cariama;38 the toucan, whose beak is huge and which probably appeared to be a very unique species; and hummingbirds, so beautiful for the radiance and brightness of their feathers. Among the mammals were the sloth; the anteater; the armadillo; the tapir; coendou, a kind of porcupine with a prehensile tail;39 the llama; the cavia or Guinea pig;40 the jaguar; the agouti;41 and the howling monkeys, such as the alouatta42 that has a drum under the throat and whose howls can be heard from far away. Marcgrave’s book shows the now established reality that quadrupeds from South America are different from those found in the southern parts of the old continent. Mammals from North America such as the bison, the reindeer, the moose, the wolf, the fox, and the dog might have crossed the frozen seas and reached Europe and Asia, which explains why they can be found in the northern parts of both continents. But animals from warm countries such as the elephant, the rhinoceros, the royal tiger,43 the lion, and many other animals did not have the same emigration opportunities; they would have had to cross the ocean, a journey beyond their ability, and furthermore they would not have been able to survive in the cold of the polar areas. Thus, it confirms that no terrestrial animals, in particular mammals from South America, belong to the old continent and vice-versa; hence, the certainty that the distribution of animals on earth is posterior to its current configuration and occurred after the two oceans separated the old continent from America.44

  • 45 . [Sauvegarde, or jungle-runner, a large monitor-like lizard of the genus Tupinambis, containing se (...)
  • 46 [Tapuyas, a collective designation for a group of tribes holding an extensive area in Eastern Braz (...)
  • 47 [Tupinambas, South American Indian peoples who spoke Tupian languages and inhabited the eastern co (...)
  • 48 [Willem Piso’s De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim of 1658; see notes 21 (...)
  • 49 [Marcus Eliezer Bloch (born 1723, Ansbach; died 6 August 1799, Carlsbad), a German medical doctor (...)
  • 50 [Martin Hinrich Carl Lichtenstein (born 10 January 1780, Hamburg; died 2 September 1857, Kiel), a (...)
  • 51 [Achille Valenciennes (born 9 August 1794, Paris; died 13 April 1865, Paris), a French zoologist w (...)

8The other sections of Marcgrave’s book on the history of animals are also very rich; we can see the sauvegarde,45 a six-foot long lizard; and the iguana, another species of long lizard that was a food source for the population and that is still considered a nice dish today. More than one hundred species of fishes are very well illustrated with colored figures. We can learn their history and their names in the different languages from Brazil since Marcgrave reported the names they were called among the Tapuyas,46 the Tupinambas,47 and other tribes of this region of America, which is sometimes of interest. Insects are also quite numerous in his book. The edition done by Piso48 mostly includes several crustaceans and many other figures that can be found neither in Marcgrave nor in the Count of Nassau’s two collections. They are actually of lesser quality but a few are still useful today because they were never reproduced anywhere else. The illustrations from the Prince of Nassau—as you know, he was anointed Prince—have an interest separate from Marcgrave and Piso’s work and I must talk about it. They were used by Bloch for his history of fishes;49 he copied about fifty figures that he was unable to draw from nature. So that they would all have the same dimensions, he doubled and sometimes tripled the measurements of the ones done by Marcgrave. As a result, some light inaccuracies in Marcgrave’s illustrations look hideous in his; and he did even worse: he unscrupulously altered the Prince of Nassau’s drawings under the pretense of making some corrections. When he thought that a species belonged to a different species from his imagination, he made some alterations that were only scandalous falsifications. As a result, some figures represent anything but the object they were supposed to illustrate and naturalists often think they can find in Brazil a specific species while in reality they find a different species, altered by Bloch to make it match his own nomenclature. These verifications were done only after Bloch’s death, first by Lichtenstein,50 professor of natural history at the Berlin Museum, and then by Valenciennes51 who went to Berlin to get a copy of Prince of Nassau’s illustrations that enabled us to certify all the falsifications done by Bloch. This fact is of utmost importance and I will go back to it when I reach the topic of natural history of fishes in the eighteenth century. I only mention it now because of the opportunity while talking about Marcgrave’s book.

  • 52 [Piso’s De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica of 1658; see notes 21 and 31, above.]
  • 53 [Jacobus Bontius or Jacob de Bondt (born 1591, Leiden; died 30 November 1631, Batavia, Java), a Du (...)
  • 54 According to some modern biographies, he [Bontius] died in Batavia [modern-day Jakarta] the same y (...)
  • 55 [Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, see note 53, above.]
  • 56 [Rhinoceros refers to a group of five living species of odd-toed ungulates of the family Rhinocero (...)
  • 57 [Alfred Duvaucel (born 1793, Évreux, France; died 1824, Madras, India), a French naturalist and ex (...)
  • 58 [For Bontius, see notes 53 and 54, above.]
  • 59 [For royal tiger, see note 43, above.]
  • 60 [Babirusa or Babi rusa, Babyrousa babyrussal, a species of wild pig or warthog, characterized by h (...)
  • 61 [Flying cat-bat, apparently a reference to one of several kinds of fish-eating bats that use echol (...)
  • 62 [Cassowary, one of three living species of flightless birds of the genus Casuarius, native to the (...)
  • 63 [Calao is the Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis), also known as the Great Indian Hornbill or Great (...)
  • 64 [Phatagin, common name for the long-tailed pangolin (Manis tetradactyla), native to the sub-Sahara (...)
  • 65 [Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, (...)
  • 66 [Isle de France and the Isle de Bourbon, equivalent to Mauritius and Réunion, French islands, alon (...)
  • 67 [The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University contains the famous Tradescant Collection, the oldest c (...)
  • 68 [The British Museum, London, now The Natural History Museum, the origins of which go back to 1753, (...)
  • 69 [For Bontius, see notes 53 and 54, above.]
  • 70 [Argonaut, genus Argonauta, the only extant genus of the family Argonautidae, a group of pelagic o (...)
  • 71 [Crab of Maluku, a horseshoe crab, one of four living species of marine arthropod of the family Li (...)

9The second edition of Piso’s book52 includes new research on the East Indies. The Dutch had settled in these areas as they had done before in Brazil; they had adopted the same kind of government. The company had sent a physician over to observe the climate and give appropriate recommendations to ensure the health of the new colonies. This doctor was Jacobus Bontius of Amsterdam;53 he stayed in Batavia, on the island of Java for several years and then came back to his home country where he died in 1631.54 He had written a book on medicine regarding Java and its neighboring islands in which he also included several observations on the natural productions of these countries. This book was printed after Piso’s second edition under the title Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis libri sex.55 It presents for the first time an accurate illustration of the large animals of the East Indies. For example, he gives an excellent representation of the rhinoceros from Java, which is different from the common rhinoceros.56 We could have noticed already with this illustration that the rhinoceros from Java is not the same one as the one found in India; it has a different skin, different folds in its skin; basically it is a different animal. However, it is only recently that Messieurs Duvaucel and Diard57 demonstrated this difference which had been observed a long time ago by Bontius.58 We also owe this author the discovery of the royal tiger transversally striped;59 of the babirusa, a kind of pig with curved curled horns;60 of the crocodile; of the flying cat-bat,61 a kind of bat whose feet are joined together by a membrane that holds up for some time so that when it lands on a human figure it can hook onto it with its claws and act like an ordinary cat. Among the birds are the cassowary,62 a large bird that does not fly and whose feathers look almost like coarse hair. There is also the calao,63 whose very large bill is topped by a horn. There is also the phatagin,64 a warm-blooded mammal covered with hard and sharp scales. There is also the dodo,65 a kind of bird that is now extinct; it had the size of the cassowary but its shape was different; its bill in particular was longer and ended in a hook. The dodo did not live in Java but on the small islands that we now call the Isle de France and the Isle de Bourbon; the first one was known at that time as Mauritius.66 This species of bird was destroyed by the first inhabitants of these islands; only one head and one leg remain today; one is kept at Oxford,67 the other is in the British Museum in London.68 Bontius69 published the first illustration of the orangutan. Until then, naturalists only knew monkeys from Barbary and from the African coasts; but the orangutan, the monkey that resembles humans the most, lives only on Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. The illustration, however, is not very accurate and looks like a woman covered with hair. He also talks about fishes and mollusks. Some of the mollusks are noteworthy, for example the argonaut,70 although already a known species; and the crab of Maluku,71 a large crustacean that lives in these areas and of which a similar species can also be found in America. In botany, this book also introduces several rare species: the nutmeg, the cinnamon tree, and the coconut from the Maldives. So, generally speaking, Bontius’s work is for natural history of the East Indies what Marcgrave’s book was for natural history of South America. But it is not as good; it treats a smaller number of species and does not give enough of their characteristics. Bontius would have probably written a better work if he had been less busy with his duties as the physician of the colony or if he had been, like Marcgrave, just an assistant in charge of natural history. Furthermore, he did not have access to artists as good as the ones Marcgrave had. However, with the publication of his book, the East India Company contributed positively to all branches of natural history. De Laet was the one who took care of this publication.

  • 72 [For Buffon, see Volume 1, Lesson 7, note 39.]

10Something important needs to be specified about the illustrations in this book. They were engraved on wood, thus allowing a much greater number of copies than if they had been engraved in copper. However, in order to avoid a new engraving, when a bookseller thought two species to be identical, he had them represented on the same plate. As a result, several naturalists were mistaken for a long time. In the section of Bontius’s book on the East Indies, reproductions of figures of reptiles and fishes are featured that had already been published in Marcgrave’s book on Brazil. This error happened because the bookseller wanted to avoid the cost of a new engraving; no animal from the East Indies is common to both worlds. Buffon72 was the first one to demonstrate that such identification of species is not acceptable whether it be for mammals or for any other terrestrial animals. If I may add to it, I would say that this is not acceptable either for marine animals; indeed, though fishes can live next to continents and disperse without practical difficulty from the Indian Ocean all the way to the Archipelago, they did not do so, or maybe one or two out of a thousand species did, but that is all. It is said that the species from warm countries cannot cross the Cape of Good Hope because beyond the Cape, the seas are too cold. And, in fact, the ocean is very difficult for fishes to cross; most of them can only live in coastal areas. Only large fishes like the sea bream, the bonito, and a few cetaceans can actually undertake this journey. At the same latitude where the temperature is not an obstacle, fishes from the United States are not the same ones as those from the coast of Europe either. Only a few are common to both coasts. It is probably the same situation in the Pacific Ocean, the coasts of China and of Peru; but we still have very little information on the animals of the Pacific Ocean.

11While Dutch naturalists brought to our knowledge the results of their research from the colonies they had conquered over the Portuguese, other less well-traveled naturalists also studied foreign productions. They received from their correspondents, productions from foreign countries that helped expand natural history as well but through secondary sources.

  • 73 [Charles de Lecluse, or Carolus Clusius (born 19 February 1526, Arras; died 4 April 1609, Leiden), (...)
  • 74 [For Rondelet, see Lesson 3, above.]
  • 75 [Maximilian II (born 31 July 1527, Vienna; died 12 October 1576, Prague), king of Bohemia and Germ (...)
  • 76 [Rudolph II (born 18 July 1552, Vienna; died 20 January 1612, Prague), Holy Roman Emperor (1576-16 (...)
  • 77 [Academy of Leiden, present-day Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, found (...)
  • 78 [Joseph Justus Scaliger (born 5 August 1540, Agen; died 21 January 1609, Leiden), a Dutch religiou (...)
  • 79 Clusius died in 1609 [see note 73, above], a few days after Scaliger. [M. de St.-Agy]
  • 80 [Rariorum plantarum historia, Antwerp: Johannes Moretum, 1601, [11] + 364 + cccxlviii + [11] p.]
  • 81 [Exoticorum libri decem, quibus animalium, plantarum, aromatum, aliorumque peregrinorum fructuum h (...)
  • 82 This animal [a fruit bait or flying fox, a member of the genus Pteropus] is three feet wide when i (...)
  • 83 [Penguins, a group of some twenty species of aquatic, flightless birds of the family Spheniscidae, (...)
  • 84 [Calao, see note 63, above.]
  • 85 [Lithophytes, plants that grow in or on rocks, which feed off nutrients from rain water and nearby (...)
  • 86 [Madrepores are stony corals, often forming reefs or islands in tropical locations.]
  • 87 [Gorgonian coral or gorgonians, an order of sessile colonial cnidarians found throughout the ocean (...)
  • 88 [Alcyon or Halcyon, a genus of kingfishers, passerine birds of the family Halcyonidae.]
  • 89 [Spermaceti, a white, waxy substance consisting of various esters of fatty acids, found most often (...)
  • 90 [Chimaera, a genus of cartilaginous fishes of the order Chimaeriformes, known informally as the ra (...)
  • 91 [Tetraodon, a genus of bony fishes of the pufferfish family (Tetraodontidae); widely distributed f (...)
  • 92 [Diodon, a genus of bony fishes of the family Diodontidae, commonly known as porcupinefishes; like (...)
  • 93 [White-spotted boxfish, Ostracion meleagris, a common and wide-spread species of the family Ostrac (...)
  • 94 [Ostracion, a genus of the boxfish family (Ostraciidae), containing about eight species and charac (...)

12Among those who described foreign natural history, Charles de Lecluse, in Latin, Carolus Clusius,73 was the most learned of them all. He was born in Arras in 1526. At that time, the region of Artois belonged to the House of Austria as was the case for all the Netherlands. Clusius studied law in Ghent and Louvain. After three years, he left Louvain to travel to Germany and stayed some time in Marburg and Wittenberg. In 1550, he visited Frankfurt, Strasburg, Switzerland, Lyon, and then established himself in Montpellier where he met Rondelet,74 the famous author of natural history of fishes, and where he studied medicine and botany. After receiving his degree in medicine in 1555, he traveled through Geneva, Basel, Koln, Antwerp, and then back to his homeland where he stayed for six years. Then he went to Paris for two years, to Louvain for one, visited Augsburg in 1563, and went to Spain a year later through Western France. In 1571, he went to England and came back that same year, under the auspices of Emperor Maximilian II,75 to become director of his gardens. He held that position for fourteen years under Maximilian II and his successor Rudolph II.76 Maximilian II was a great patron of the sciences, but Rudolph was even more passionate about it. He sacrificed the daily affairs of state for it to such an extent that his neglect was one of the reasons for the civil wars that erupted after he was in power. After his death, Clusius, who was under his protection, left Vienna for Frankfurt where he spent six years in almost complete solitude. In 1589, the Academy of Leiden77 invited him to hold the chair of botany. He held this position for sixteen years. The University of Leiden had been founded not long before by the states of Holland. Among Clusius’s colleagues were several famous men of that time, such as Joseph Scaliger.78 Clusius died in 1609, a few days after Scaliger.79 We will talk more about Clusius later when we study the history of botany, since he wrote a book called Rariorum plantarum historia that is one of the best works of his time.80 With regard to zoology, his work called Exoticorum libri X, quibus animalium is also very valuable.81 It is a collection of several books about productions from foreign countries; some are from Spanish authors, others from Portuguese authors. He also talks about botany, but what remains today is only the part of this book that deals with animals, which are the fifth and sixth books. Clusius provides perfectly accurate illustrations and descriptions of several species of animals from different parts of the globe. We can see for the first time the flying fox, a bat as big as a chicken that lives in the East Indies.82 It also features several species that are also recognized by Bontius, such as the dodo and the cassowary; but this work is of a lesser quality than Bontius’s. It was published in Antwerp in 1605. Clusius’s book also introduces for the first time the penguin, a kind of bird that lives in the Antarctic and that can neither fly nor walk;83 and several other birds that have a difficult time flying such as the puffin, the guillemot, and the calao of Africa.84 Clusius provides an illustration of the three-banded armadillo, and of the snake of America, also known as the boa constrictor, although the name of boa does not fit it well. He gives descriptions and illustrations that are new for that time, of various rock plants, lithophytes,85 corals, madrepores,86 gorgonian corals,87 alcyons,88 and sponges. Also represented are different cetaceans that had never been shown before, such as the sperm whale and the manatee. The sperm whale is the huge animal whose head produces spermaceti;89 the manatee is another species of cetacean with two mammary glands on its chest. When it breast feeds its babies, she holds them with one of her flippers and takes a more upright position so that both heads remain above water. While observed from afar, we can see some resemblance with the human species, and this is where the tale of the mermaids and sea women come from. The illustration of the fish called Chimaera,90 with a very unique fin arrangement is also represented by Clusius, with an even more unique look since he drew it from a dried sample that was completely skewed. Other represented species include Tetraodon,91 a toothless species of fish with bony jaws; and for the first time Diodon,92 a kind of pufferfish, all covered with spines that lives in warm seas. Finally, there is the white-spotted boxfish;93 its skin is so solid and its scales so fused together that even when its flesh has been destroyed by putrefaction, its carapace still remains and looks like a box or a trunk. It is now called Ostracion.94

13So, basically, Clusius’s book is one of the works that has been the most beneficial to natural history during the second half of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  • 95 [Novus orbis seu descriptio Indiae occidentalis, libri XVIII, novis talulis geographicis et variis (...)
  • 96 [Trichiurus, a genus of bony fishes of the family Trichiuridae, commonly known as the cutlassfishe (...)

14Johannes de Laet, whom we talked about earlier, in his role as director of the West India Company and who significantly contributed to the publication of Piso and Marcgrave’s works, was, as well, as I told you earlier, a very well-educated man. He wrote Novus orbis, seu descriptio Indiae occidentalis, libri XVIII, printed in folio, in Leiden in 1633, by Elzevir,95 which includes maps of the best quality that could possibly be done at that time, with the few documents that were then available. He describes the various regions of America that were discovered during his lifetime, their inhabitants and the natural productions of these regions. This book, as you can see by its date, was done prior to Marcgrave and Piso’s books, thus de Laet did not have the knowledge of their research when he published his own observations. But, in his time as director of the India Company, he had established several contacts with Brazil. Travelers were actually very pleased to report to him curious facts they observed. This is how he was able to give descriptions of animals from Brazil before Marcgrave and Piso. He even used his own plates for their works. I point this out so that young naturalists who might research his works will know about it. It would be erroneous to think that Marcgrave’s illustrations are matched to actual descriptions or that they have a common origin; indeed, when de Laet thought he recognized an object that he had had engraved, he used his engraving and applied it to Marcgrave’s description. Four or five errors in Marcgrave’s work come from this misuse. They led to several wrong identifications of fishes, such as the species of Trichiurus.96 It was believed until very recently that it was a freshwater fish. This mistake comes from the fact, as I said, that de Laet matched its illustration to one of Marcgrave’s descriptions that was actually related to a different species. This is, messieurs, one of the most useful qualities of the history of natural sciences, to bring to knowledge the circumstances in which not only a book has been created, but also published and printed so that we can evaluate up to what point we can trust the assertions these books contain.

  • 97 [Johann Eusebius Nieremberg or Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (born 1595, Madrid; died 7 April 1658, Madr (...)
  • 98 [Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, libri XVI, distincta. ignota indiarum animalia, quadrupedes, (...)

15Another less well-traveled man who described foreign species was Johann Eusebius Nieremberg.97 He was born in Madrid in 1590 from parents who were originally from Tyrol (his name indeed shows that he belongs to a German family). He was less well educated than Clusius and, in a sense, even less than de Laet. He joined the Order of the Jesuits and was sent as a missionary to the mountains of Algeria. While there he studied the natural productions of this area and gained such knowledge that he was called back to Madrid to teach as a professor of natural history in the College of Jesuits of that town. He died in 1658. He wrote books on theology and ascetic works that are beyond the scope of our study. We will only talk about him for his book called Historia naturae maxime peregrinae libri XVI.98 It is a one volume folio, printed in Antwerp in 1635. As you can see, all these works are contemporaneous: Johannes de Laet published in 1633, Johann Eusebius Nieremberg in 1635, and Georg Marcgrave a little bit later, in 1648.

  • 99 [Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel Ribera y Velasco de Tovar, Count of Olivares and Duke of San Lúcar la (...)
  • 100 [Philip IV of Spain (born 8 April 1605, Valladolid; died 17 September 1665, Madrid), King of Spain (...)
  • 101 [Gil Blas, a picaresque novel by Alain-Rene Lesage (French novelist and playwright; born 6 May 166 (...)
  • 102 [Sarigue or zarigueya is Didelphis, a genus of marsupials of the family Didelphidae, including six (...)
  • 103 [Viscachas or vizcachas, rodents of the genera Lagidium and Lagostomus of the family Chinchillidae (...)
  • 104 [For coendou, see note 39, above.]
  • 105 [Thomas Pennant (born 14 June 1726, Flintshire, Wales; died 16 December 1798, Flintshire), a Welsh (...)
  • 106 [Apparently a reference to one of Linnaeus’s favorite pets, a raccoon (see note 107, below) that h (...)
  • 107 [Raccoon (Procyon lotor), well known for its habit of dousing food items; they are often observed (...)
  • 108 [Francisco López de Gómara (born c. 1511, Gomara; died c. 1566, probably Seville), Spanish histori (...)
  • 109 [Vicugna, a genus containing two South American camelids, the vicuña and the alpaca.]
  • 110 [Marmoset, the name for an assemblage of twenty-two species of New World monkeys of the genera Cal (...)
  • 111 [For Aldrovandi, see Lesson 4, above.]
  • 112 [This Cassowary without a casque must be a species of Rhea, a genus of ratite (flightless birds) n (...)

16Nieremberg’s work was dedicated to the Count of Olivarez,99 favorite minister of Philip IV,100 made famous by the Gil Blas novel.101 It includes a lot of superstition and very little critique. The author goes into metaphysical discussions linked to ideas from the Middle Ages, still predominant at that time, especially in the Colleges of the Jesuits. However, his book includes interesting observations on new plants and animals. It shows the sarigue,102 a small opossum that holds its babies in a pouch; the viscacha,103 a large rodent of the size of a hare with a tail as long as the cat’s tail; there is also the coendou,104 a kind of prehensile tailed porcupine. The viscacha, already featured by Nieremberg and later by Pennant,105 was until recently almost unknown to naturalists; it has only been a few years since we have had access to its skin in Europe, almost at the same time as the one from the chinchilla, a similar species but smaller and with a more loose fur. However, the figure engraved in wood that Nieremberg provides is very identifiable. He also gives the figure of the raccoon, a species close to the bear. This raccoon is the raccoon from Linnaeus,106 called like that because it does not eat anything unless it has dipped it first in water.107 There is also the bison, the large bull with a hump from North America, found in northern Mexico; it is common to Louisiana in the United States. Nieremberg could have only learned about it through the Mexicans; indeed, he learned about it from Gómara,108 a Spanish traveler I did not talk about because he did not do much. In Nieremberg’s work is also featured the vicugna;109 the marmoset,110 a small monkey that has ears in the shape of paintbrushes; the birds of paradise that Aldrovandi111 and Clusius had already mentioned; finally, the cassowary without a casque112 and the rattlesnake. Nieremberg not only took figures from manuscripts, he also borrowed ones from Clusius; but, I suspect that most of his illustrations come from Hernández’s manuscripts.

  • 113 [John Jonston or Joannes Jonstonus (born 15 September 1603, Szamotuły, Poland; died 8 June 1675, L (...)

17Here are, messieurs, the writers from the middle of the seventeenth century who contributed to our knowledge of foreign animals, either from their own observations in the countries of origin, or from the information they received from their correspondents. All the work done by these writers is gathered in a large collection that was put together by John Jonston and published from 1649 to 1653.113 His history of animals is a summary of all prior research, either by critics who had researched the books of the Ancients for any document that could still be there, or by travelers or by collectors. It was the book of reference in zoology in terms of general science up until the time of Linnaeus and Buffon; I say general science because for each specific branch, books of a better quality were successively published but none that covered science as a whole was ever published. We will finish our history of zoology for the period of our interest by the study of this book.

  • 114 [Thaumatographia naturalis, in decem classes distincta, in quibus admiranda I. Coeli. II. Elemento (...)
  • 115 [On the contrary, Jonston’s work was first published in six separate volumes, some with different (...)
  • 116 [Salviani, Belon, Gessner, Rondelet, and Aldrovandi, the great Renaissance ichthyologists; see Les (...)

18Jonston belonged to a Scottish family who had settled in Silesia or in Poland; he was born in 1603 in Sambter, near Lesnow, in the palatinate of Posen in Poland. In 1632, he became a doctor in medicine in Leiden. Apparently, he was a wealthy man and he retired to one of his properties, called Ziebendorf, located near Lignitz in Silesia, where he died at age seventy-two. He had built up at this property quite a substantial library; he worked as a doctor and spent his free time writing. The first book he wrote is called Thaumatographia naturalis (description of natural miracles).114 It is a compendium of everything curious and extraordinary found in the sky, meteors, fossils, animals, plants, and humans; it is less a book of doctrine than a book of pure curiosity. It was printed in Amsterdam in duodecimo in 1632. I mention it just to show how Jonston enjoyed gathering extraordinary facts. But this author is important to us for the natural history of animals he wrote, a four-volume work that were published successively.115 The first volume talks of fishes and bloodless animals and is called De piscibus et exsanguinibus; it was published in 1649. The second one is about birds and was published in 1650. The third is about quadrupeds, published in 1652. The fourth, published in 1653, is about insects and snakes. The first volume is a very well-done summary of what was written by former ichthyologists, Salviani, Belon, Gessner, Rondelet, and Aldrovandi.116 It is quite well organized and written with elegance. His work was almost completed when Marcgrave’s work was published, thus he simply added to the end of his volume what Marcgrave wrote on fishes.

  • 117 [Matthaeus Merian the Elder (born 22 September 1593, Basel; died 19 June 1650, Bad Schwalbach, nea (...)
  • 118 [For Aristotle, Pliny, Aelian, see Volume 1, parts 3 and 5.]
  • 119 [The yale or centicore, a mythical beast found in European mythology and heraldry; most descriptio (...)
  • 120 [The carnivorous bull, a mythical and extremely ferocious breed of bull native to Ethiopia (sub-Sa (...)
  • 121 [A reference to the well-known account of a sperm whale beached on the Dutch coast in the late six (...)

19In his book on birds he followed the same methodology; he took the works of Gessner and Aldrovandi, took some excerpts from them, wrote some summaries, shortened the chapters, organized the content in a more practical way, and gave to the whole a more elegant presentation. He did the same for the quadrupeds and the insects. His plates were no longer printed from woodcuts as prior authors had used; they were now in copper and engraved by a skilled artist named Merian.117 Almost all the figures that were included by the authors I just named are included in his book. In addition, many new ones are included, especially in the volume on quadrupeds. The mythical animals mentioned by Pliny, Aelian, and Aristotle118 such as the yale,119 the carnivorous bull,120 and the unicorn are also included; and, as with many other naturalists, Jonston did not have a problem mixing them up with existing animals. It is important to identify which of the figures are based on Gessner’s work; the ones that were made after nature are excellent. Among the illustrations done by Jonston that are accurate, I would cite the one of the sperm whale that had become stranded on the coast of Holland.121

  • 122 [For the first and second editions of Jonston’s Historiae naturalis, see note 113, above; the Heid (...)
  • 123 [Theatrum universale omnium animalium, piscium, avium, quadrupedum, exanguium aquaticorum, insecto (...)
  • 124 [Hendrik Ruysch, see note 123, above.]
  • 125 [Francois Valentijn (born 17 April 1666, Dordrecht; died 1727, The Hague), a Dutch minister and na (...)
  • 126 [Louis Renard (born 1678 or 1679, Charlemont, France; died 1746, Amsterdam), bookdealer, publisher (...)

20Jonston’s work, like those of Gessner and others, were translated and reprinted many times. The first edition, which is from Frankfurt, is of bad quality; a good printed edition exists from Amsterdam; another one from Heidelberg, from 1755 to 1767, is not as nice.122 There is another edition in two volumes in folio that was printed in Amsterdam and seems at first sight to be a different book since its title is different: Theatrum animalium cura Henrici Ruyschi (this is the name of the son of the famous naturalist I will talk about when I discuss the history of anatomy).123 We learn that it is Jonston’s work only by reading the preface. It includes the same plates and the same text except for a few figures of fishes from India that were copied from collections of drawings done by locals of that country and that Ruysch124added to the beginning of the book. I will have the opportunity to talk about these collections that were used for books that featured these drawings in a better way, such as by Valentijn125 and Renard;126 I cite them only to remember them. To conclude with my comments on Jonston’s book, I would note that his various editions were the books of reference in zoology until the middle of the eighteenth century, thus for almost a century.

  • 127 [Dendographias sive historiae naturalis de arboribus et fructicibus, tam nostri quam peregrini orb (...)
  • 128 [Notitia regni vegetabilis, seu Plantarum a veteribus observatarum, in suas classes redacta series(...)
  • 129 [Notitia regni mineralis, seu Subterraneorum catalogus, cum praecipuis differentiis, Leipzig: Viti (...)
  • 130 [The full title of Jonston’s “universal history” (a textbook meant to facilitate the learning of h (...)
  • 131 [Polyhistor seu rerum ab exortu universi ad nostra usque tempora, per Asiam, Africam, Europa et Am (...)

21Jonston also wrote a few other books. He published in 1662 a book called Dendographia,127 a description of all the trees; it is a similar compilation to the one he did for animals. He includes figures that are quite well engraved but too small in size; botany requires more detailed illustrations. He also wrote a book called Notitia regni vegetabilis128and another one called Notitia regni mineralis;129 these two books were published in Leipzig in 1661. He even wrote a universal history, printed in Leiden in 1663;130 and another book called Polyhistor, published in 1660 in Jena.131 But all these compendiums are beyond the topic of our study and do not deserve our time spent on them. The history of zoology for the period we are studying ends with Jonston’s work, which is, in a way, the summary of everything that had been written since the Renaissance.

22In our next session I will begin the history of botany during the same period of time that I covered for the history of zoology.

Note

1 [For Hernández, see Lesson 5, note 78.]

2 [Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (born 14 September 1769, Berlin; died 6 May 1859, Berlin), a Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer, whose quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.]

3 [Obviously, Cuvier means to refer here to “New Spain,” formally called the Viceroyalty of New Spain, a viceroyalty of the crown of Castile, formed in 1535, as the realm of the Spanish empire, which comprised the territories in the north, from North America and the Caribbean, to the Philippines. Established following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, it included, on the mainland of the Americas, much of North America south of Canada: all of present-day Mexico and Central America except Panama, and most of the United States west of the Mississippi River, plus Florida.]

4 [Cuvier means to say “1763,” in referring here to the Treaty of Paris, also known as the Peace of Paris and the Treaty of 1763, signed on 10 February 1763 by the kingdoms of Great Britain, France, and Spain, with Portugal in agreement, after Britain’s victory over France and Spain during the Seven Years’War. The signing of the treaty formally ended the Seven Years’ War, otherwise known as the French and Indian War in the North American theatre, which marked the beginning of an era of British dominance outside Europe.]

5 [The Admiral of Coligny is Gaspard II de Coligny (born 16 February 1519, Châtillon-sur-Loing; died 24 August 1572, Paris), a French nobleman and admiral, best remembered as a disciplined Huguenot leader in the French Wars of Religion.]

6 [Persecution during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France; French Protestants inspired by the writings of John Calvin (an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation; born 10 July 1509, died 27 May 1564) in the 1530s, who by the 1560s were called Huguenots. By the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, roughly 500,000 Huguenots had fled France during a series of religious persecutions, relocating to numerous Protestant nations around the world, including the English colonies of North America.]

7 [Nicolas Durand, Sieur de Villegaignon (born 1510, Villegaignon, Seine et Marne, France; died 9 January 1571, Beauvais, Picardy, France), a Commander of the Knights of Malta, and later a French naval officer (vice-admiral of Brittany) who attempted to help the Huguenots in France escape persecution. A notable public figure in his time, he was a mixture of soldier, scientist, explorer, adventurer, and entrepreneur; he fought pirates in the Mediterranean and participated in several wars.]

8 [Fort Coligny, a fortress founded by Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (see note 7, above) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1555, in what constituted the so-called France Antarctique historical episode.]

9 [André de Thevet (born 1516, Angoulême; died 23 November 1590, Paris), a French Franciscan priest, explorer, cosmographer, and writer who traveled to Brazil in the sixteenth century. He described the country, its aboriginal inhabitants, and the historical episodes involved in the France Antarctique, a French settlement in Rio de Janeiro, in his book Singularitez de la France Antarctique (see note 11, below).]

10 [Gyllius is Pierre Gilles, also known as Pierre Alby; see Lesson 3, notes 15 and 26, above; and Volume 1, Lesson 15, note 20.]

11 [Les singularitez de la France Antarctique, autrement nommée Amérique: & de plusieurs terre & isles découuerte de nostre temps, À Paris: chez les héritiers de Maurice de la Porte, 1558, [8] + 166 + [2] p., illus., in-4°; the text was published in 1557, but bears the date 1558; an English translation by Thomas Hacket appeared in London in 1568.]

12 [Laporte is Maurice de la Porte (born 1531, Paris; died 23 April 1571, Paris), a French lexicographer.]

13 [La cosmographie universelle d’André Thevet, cosmographe du roy: illustrée de diverses figures des choses plus remarquables veues par l’auteur, & incogneuës de noz anciens & modernes, Paris: Guillaume Chandiere, 1575, 2 vols (vol. 1: [20] + 467 + [12] leaves + [2] fold. leaves of pls; vol. 2: [8] + 469-914 + 912-936 + [1]+ 903-1025 + [18] leaves + [2] fold. leaves of pls), ill., maps, in-folio.]

14 [Jean de Léry (born 1536, Lamargelle, Côte-d’Or, France; died 1613), a French explorer, writer, and Reformed Pastor who might have remained unknown had he not accompanied a group of Protestants to their new colony on an island in the Bay of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the colony, called France Antarctique, was founded by the Chevalier de Villegaignon (see note 7, above), with promises of religious freedom, but on arrival, the Chevalier contested the Protestants’beliefs and persecuted them. After eight months the Protestants left their colony and settled on the mainland, near the Tupinamba Indians. These events were the basis of de Lery’s book, titled Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, published in 1578 (see Léry (Jean de), History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise called America: containing the navigation and the remarkable things seen on the sea by the author; the behavior of Villegagnon in that country; the customs and strange ways of life of the American savages; together with the description of various animals, trees, plants, and other singular things completely unknown over here [translation and introduction by Whatley Janet], Berkeley; Oxford: University of California Press, 1990, 1 vol. (LXII + 276 p.), illus. (Latin American literature and culture; 6).]

15 The actual title of de Léry’s book is Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amerique (see note 14, above), La Rochelle: Antoine Chuppin, 1578, [48] + 424 + [13] p., 9 ills; another edition appeared in that same year in Rouen.]

16 [The Count of Coligny is François de Coligny (born 1557, died 1591), a French Protestant general of the Wars of Religion, son of Gaspard II de Coligny (see note 5, above), Admiral of Coligny.]

17 [Philip II, see Lesson 2, note 1.]

18 [Johan Maurits (born 17 June 1604, Dillenburg; died 20 December 1679, Cleves), Count and later (from 1674) Prince of Nassau-Siegen, and Grand Master of the Order of Saint John (Bailiwick of Brandenburg); appointed governor of the Dutch possessions in Brazil in 1636 by the Dutch West India Company, he landed at Recife, the port of Pernambuco and the chief stronghold of the Dutch, in January 1637, where his policies and leadership caused the colony to flourish. The residence he built in The Hague, now called the Mauritshuis, houses the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, a major museum of old Dutch paintings.]

19 [Dutch West India Company, a chartered company (known as the WIC) of Dutch merchants. On 3 June 1621, it was granted a charter for a trade monopoly in the West Indies (meaning the Caribbean) by the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands and given jurisdiction over the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. The area within which the company could operate consisted of West Africa (between the Tropic of Cancer and the Cape of Good Hope) and the Americas, which included the Pacific Ocean and the eastern part of New Guinea. The intended purpose of the charter was to eliminate competition, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, between the various trading posts established by the merchants. The company became instrumental in the Dutch colonization of the Americas.]

20 [Joannes or Johannes de Laet (born 1581, Antwerp; buried 15 December 1649, Leiden), a Dutch geographer, director of the Dutch West India Company (see note 19, above), and author of History of the New World, arguably the best description of the Americas published in the seventeenth century. Produced in several editions by Bonaventure and Abraham Elseviers, Leiden, the first appeared in Dutch in 1625 as Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, uit veelerhande Schriften ende Aen-teekeningen van verscheyden Natien, Leiden: In de druckerye van Isaack Elzevier, 1625, [54] + 510 + [16] p.; a second edition, also in Dutch, came out in 1630 as Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien door Joannes de Laet. Tweede druk: in ontallycke placesen verbetert, vermeerdert, met eenige nieuwe caerten, beelden van verscheijden dieren ende planten verciert, Leiden: Bij de Elzeviers, 1630, [14] + 622+ [17] p., illus., 14 maps. A Latin edition from 1633, prepared by De Laet himself, was entitled Novus Orbis seu descriptionis Indiae Occidentalis Libri XVIII authore Joanne de Laet Antverp, novis talulis geographicis et variis animantium, plantarum fructuumque iconibus illustrata, Lugduni Batauorum: apud Elzevirios, 1633, 690 p., illus.; in 1640 he published a French edition, in his own translation, as L’Histoire du Nouveau Monde ou description des Indes Occidentales, contenant dix-huict livres, enrichi de nouvelles tables geographiqiues & figures des animaux, plantes & fruicts, Leiden: B. & A. Elseuiers, 1640, 4 + 632 + [12] p., illus., 14 fold. maps. Each successive edition had significantly updated maps; his were the first to include the names Manhattan, New Amsterdam (now New York), and Massachusetts.]

21 [Willem Piso (born 1611, Leiden; died 28 November 1678, Amsterdam), a Dutch physician and naturalist who worked in Dutch Brazil from 1637 to 1644 during an expedition sponsored by Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, and the Dutch West India Company (see notes 18 and 19, above). Through his studies of tropical diseases and indigenous therapies, he is considered to be one of the founders of tropical medicine. Together with Georg Marcgrave (see note 22, below), and originally published by Joannes de Laet (see note 20, above), Piso wrote Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648; see note 28, below), an important early western insight into Brazilian flora and fauna.]

22 [Georg Marcgrave (born 1610; died 1644, Guinea), a German naturalist and astronomer, proficient as well in botany, mathematics, and medicine, who, in 1637, was appointed astronomer of an expedition to the Dutch colony in Brazil, accompanied by Willem Piso, a physician and the newly appointed governor of the Dutch possessions in that country (see note 21, above). Marcgrave afterward entered the service of Count Maurits of Nassau-Siegen (see note 18, above), whose liberality supplied him with the means of exploring a considerable part of Brazil. He arrived in Brazil in early 1638 and undertook the first zoological, botanical, and astronomical expedition there, exploring various parts of the colony to study its natural history and geography. Traveling later to the coast of Guinea, he fell victim to the climate.]

23 [A nickname originating from Liebstadt, a town in the Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge district, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, where Marcgrave is said to have been born.]

24 [Cranitz is Henri Cralitz, a young German student who was sent, along with Georg Marcgrave (see note 22, above), to the Dutch colony in Brazil, but died shortly after arriving there.]

25 [Johan Maurits, see note 18, above.]

26 [Frederick William (born 16 February 1620, Berlin; died 29 April 1688, Potsdam), Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia from 1640 until his death. A member of the House of Hohenzollern, he is popularly known as “The Great Elector” because of his military and political prowess; a staunch pillar of the Calvinist faith, associated with the rising commercial class, he saw the importance of trade and promoted it vigorously.]

27 [The Royal Library of Berlin is now the Berlin State Library, one the largest libraries in Europe and one of the most important academic research libraries in the German-speaking world. The two collections of paintings, eight hundred or so depictions of Brazilian plants and animals were removed from the Preussische Staatsbibliotek in Berlin during World War II and are at present housed at the Jagiellon Library in Cracow, Poland.]

28 [Historia naturalis Brasiliae, auspicio et beneficio illustriss. I. Mauritii com. Nassau illius provinciæ et maris summi præfecti adornata: in qua non tantum plantæ et animalia, sed et indigenarum morbi, ingenia et mores describuntur et iconibus supra quingentas illustrantur, the first scientific book about Brazil, originally published in Latin by Franciscus Hackius and Lodewijk Elzevir, Leiden and Amsterdam, 1648 (2 parts: [8] + 122 + [2] p.; [4] + 293 + [7] p.), illus., in-folio.]

29 [Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Aldrovandi, and Gessner, the Renaissance zoologists; see Lesson 3.]

30 [Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, see Volume 1, Lesson 7, note 39.]

31 De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim, quorum contenta pagina sequens exhibet, Amsterdam: Ludovicum & Danielem Elzevirios, 1658, [24] + 327 + [5] + 39 + 226 + [2] p., illus., in-folio.]

32 [Passiflora, known also as the passion flowers or passion vines, a genus of about 500 species of flowering plants, the namesakes of the family Passifloraceae; they are mostly vines, but some species are shrubs and a few are herbaceous.]

33 [Anacardium, a genus of flowering plants of the family Anacardiaceae, native to tropical regions of the Americas.]

34 [Manioc, also called Cassava, a species (Manihot esculenta) of woody shrub of the Euphorbiaceae (spurge) family, native to South America; extensively cultivated as an annual crop in tropical and subtropical regions for its edible, starchy, tuberous root, it is a major source of carbohydrates.]

35 [Ipecacuanha, the common name for Carapichea ipecacuanha, a species of flowering plant of the Rubiaceae family, native to Brazil; the root is used to make syrup of ipecac, a powerful emetic.]

36 [Toco is the Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco), also known as the Toucan or Common Toucan, the largest and probably the best known species of the toucan family, found in semi-open habitats throughout a large part of central and eastern South America.]

37 [Kamichi, also called the Horned Screamer (Anhima cornuta), a large South American bird, characterized by having a long, slender, horn-like ornament on its head and two sharp claws or spurs on each wing; although its beak, feet, and legs resemble those of gallinaceous birds, it is related anatomically to ducks and geese; it is often domesticated and kept with poultry, which it defends against birds of prey.]

38 [Cariama, also known as the Red-legged Seriema (Cariama cristata), a large, long-legged, crane-like, South American wading bird.]

39 [Coendou or coendous, prehensile-tailed porcupines of the genus Coendou, found in Central and South America, most notable for their spineless prehensile tail, and front and hind feet modified for grasping. Adept climbers, they are well adapted to living in trees where they spend most of their lives; they are perhaps best known for their distinctive “baby-like” sounds that they use to communicate with each other in the wild.]

40 [Cavia is the guinea pig (Cavia porcellus), also called the cavy, a species of rodent belonging to the family Caviidae; despite its common name, this animal is not in the pig family, nor is it from Guinea —it originated in the Andes.]

41 [Agouti refers to a number of species of Central and South American rodents, whose fur contains a pattern of pigmentation in which individual hairs have several bands of light and dark pigment with black tips.]

42 [Alouatta, a genus containing the fifteen recognized species of howler monkeys, which are among the largest of the New World monkeys, native to South and Central American forests; famous for their loud howls, the sounds can travel up to three miles through dense forest.]

43 [The Royal Bengal Tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), once the most numerous tiger subspecies, its populations are now severely depressed, with estimates of 1,706 to 1,909 in India, 440 in Bangladesh, 163 to 253 in Nepal, and 67 to 81 in Bhutan. Since 2010, it has been classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The total population is estimated at fewer than 2,500 individuals with a decreasing trend, and no region within the tiger’s range is now large enough to support an effective population size of 250 adult individuals.]

44 [An apparent allusion to the modern-day theory of plate tectonics and continental drift, not widely accepted until the 1950s, following the pioneering work of German geophysicist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener (born 1 November 1880, Berlin; died November 1930, Clarinetania Greenland), who was the first to advance an hypothesis of continental drift (Kontinentalverschiebung) in 1912.] We do not know whether the current situation of the continents was created by an astronomical movement or by a huge expansion of the globe that would have thrown the waters where they are now. But, whatever the reason, climate change has been a definite consequence; we found in Montmartre, near Paris, bones of tapirs and American didelphi [the opossum, genus Didelphus] that prove that these animals used to live here. Generally speaking, all fossils belong to species from the tropics. [M. de St.-Agy]

45 . [Sauvegarde, or jungle-runner, a large monitor-like lizard of the genus Tupinambis, containing seven species native to South America and Panama. Although they are large reptiles, reaching a total length of about 1.23 m (4 feet) and a weight of 6.8 kg (15 lb), Cuvier’s estimate of 6 feet is an exaggeration.]

46 [Tapuyas, a collective designation for a group of tribes holding an extensive area in Eastern Brazil, constituting a distinct stock, and apparently more ancient in occupancy than any of the surrounding tribes. Their general territory extends from latitude 5 ° to 20° South, and from the Atlantic coast, inland to the Xingu River. They are sometimes also known as Crcu or Gucrcn, the “Ancient People.”]

47 [Tupinambas, South American Indian peoples who spoke Tupian languages and inhabited the eastern coast of Brazil from Ceará in the north to Porto Alegre in the south. The various groups bore such names as Potiguara, Caeté, Tupinamba, Tupinikin, and Guaraní but are known collectively as Tupinamba. The Tupinamba lived in unusually large patrilineal villages that numbered from 400 to 1,600 persons. They supplemented farming with ocean fishing. Cassava and corn (maize) were among their staple foods. Not much is known of their social organization.]

48 [Willem Piso’s De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim of 1658; see notes 21 and 31, above.]

49 [Marcus Eliezer Bloch (born 1723, Ansbach; died 6 August 1799, Carlsbad), a German medical doctor and naturalist, author of a beautifully illustrated comprehensive work on fishes, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, Berlin: Realschule, 1782-1795, 12 vols; he is generally considered one of the most important ichthyologists of the eighteenth century (see Volume 1, Lesson 8, note 17).]

50 [Martin Hinrich Carl Lichtenstein (born 10 January 1780, Hamburg; died 2 September 1857, Kiel), a German physician, explorer, botanist, zoologist, and herpetologist, he was responsible for the creation in 1841 of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, and in the field of herpetology he described many new species of amphibians and reptiles.]

51 [Achille Valenciennes (born 9 August 1794, Paris; died 13 April 1865, Paris), a French zoologist who studied under Georges Cuvier; his study of parasitic worms in humans made an important contribution to the study of parasitology. He also carried out diverse systematic classifications, linking fossil and current species. He worked with Cuvier on the twentytwo volume Histoire Naturelle des Poissons (Paris; Strasbourg: Levrault, 1828-1849, 22 vols + 4 vols of pls, color illus.), carrying on alone after Cuvier died in 1832. In 1832, he succeeded Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (born 1777, died 1850) as chair of mollusks, worms, and zoophytes at the Museum of Natural History, Paris.]

52 [Piso’s De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica of 1658; see notes 21 and 31, above.]

53 [Jacobus Bontius or Jacob de Bondt (born 1591, Leiden; died 30 November 1631, Batavia, Java), a Dutch physician and pioneer of tropical medicine, best known for his Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis libri sex, Amsterdam: Ludovicum & Danielem Elzevirios, 1658, 226 + [4] p.]

54 According to some modern biographies, he [Bontius] died in Batavia [modern-day Jakarta] the same year as indicated by Monsieur Cuvier. [M. de St.-Agy]

55 [Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, see note 53, above.]

56 [Rhinoceros refers to a group of five living species of odd-toed ungulates of the family Rhinocerotidae, two of which are native to Africa and three to Southern Asia; both African species and the Sumatran rhinoceros have two horns, while the Indian and Javan rhinoceros have a single horn.]

57 [Alfred Duvaucel (born 1793, Évreux, France; died 1824, Madras, India), a French naturalist and explorer who, in December 1817, left France for British India and arrived in Calcutta in May 1818, where he met naturalist and explorer Pierre-Médard Diard (born 1794, died 1863). Together, they moved to Chandernagore in West Bengal, then a trading post of the French East India Company, and started collecting animals and plants for the Museum of Natural History, Paris. They employed hunters who supplied them daily with live and dead specimens, which they described, drew, and classified. In June 1818, they sent their first consignment to Paris, containing a skeleton of a Ganges river dolphin, a head of a “Tibetan ox,” various species of little-known birds, some minerals, and a drawing of a tapir from Sumatra. Later consignments included a live Cashmere goat, crested pheasants, and various birds.]

58 [For Bontius, see notes 53 and 54, above.]

59 [For royal tiger, see note 43, above.]

60 [Babirusa or Babi rusa, Babyrousa babyrussal, a species of wild pig or warthog, characterized by having large curved tusks, found only on the islands of Sulawesi, Toga, and Molucca in the Indonesian archipelago; it inhabits rainforests and canebrakes, near rivers and lowland forests.]

61 [Flying cat-bat, apparently a reference to one of several kinds of fish-eating bats that use echolocation to detect tiny ripples in the water’s surface to locate fish; from there, the bat swoops down low, inches from the water, and uses specially enlarged claws on its hind feet to grab the fish out of the water.]

62 [Cassowary, one of three living species of flightless birds of the genus Casuarius, native to the tropical forests of New Guinea, nearby islands, and northeastern Australia; the most common of these, the Southern Cassowary, is the third tallest and second heaviest living bird, smaller only than the ostrich and emu.]

63 [Calao is the Great Hornbill (Buceros bicornis), also known as the Great Indian Hornbill or Great Pied Hornbill, one of the larger members of the hornbill family. Found in the forests of Nepal, India, Southeast Asia, and Sumatra, it is predominantly frugivorous, although it is also opportunistic and will prey on small mammals, reptiles, and other birds.]

64 [Phatagin, common name for the long-tailed pangolin (Manis tetradactyla), native to the sub-Saharan forests of Africa, mainly rain forests, widespread from Senegal to Uganda and south to Angola in the southwest.]

65 [Dodo (Raphus cucullatus), an extinct flightless bird that was endemic to the island of Mauritius, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The first recorded mention of the Dodo was by Dutch sailors in 1598. In the following years, the bird was hunted by sailors, and by their domesticated animals and invasive species introduced during that time. The last widely accepted sighting of a Dodo was in 1662.]

66 [Isle de France and the Isle de Bourbon, equivalent to Mauritius and Réunion, French islands, along with Rodrigues, that make up the Mascarene Islands (or Mascarenhas Archipelago) in the Western Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. The collective title is derived from the Portuguese explorer and colonial administrator Pedro Mascarenhas (born 1470; died 16 June 1555), who first visited the islands in the early sixteenth century.]

67 [The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University contains the famous Tradescant Collection, the oldest collection of natural history in England, which, in turn, includes the world’s most complete remains of the famous Dodo (see note 65, above).]

68 [The British Museum, London, now The Natural History Museum, the origins of which go back to 1753, when Sir Hans Sloane (born 16 April 1660, Killyleagh, County Down, Ireland; died 11 January 1753, Chelsea, England) left his extensive collection of curiosities to the nation; the museum’s Dodo is a composite made from the bones of several different individuals.]

69 [For Bontius, see notes 53 and 54, above.]

70 [Argonaut, genus Argonauta, the only extant genus of the family Argonautidae, a group of pelagic octopuses, also called paper nautiluses, referring to the paper-thin egg case that females secrete, which is used as a brood chamber and to hold trapped surface air to maintain buoyancy.]

71 [Crab of Maluku, a horseshoe crab, one of four living species of marine arthropod of the family Limulidae, found primarily in and around shallow marine waters, on soft sandy or muddy bottoms, in East and Southeast Asia, along the American Atlantic coast, and in the Gulf of Mexico.]

72 [For Buffon, see Volume 1, Lesson 7, note 39.]

73 [Charles de Lecluse, or Carolus Clusius (born 19 February 1526, Arras; died 4 April 1609, Leiden), a Flemish doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all sixteenth-century scientific horticulturists.]

74 [For Rondelet, see Lesson 3, above.]

75 [Maximilian II (born 31 July 1527, Vienna; died 12 October 1576, Prague), king of Bohemia and Germany from 1562, king of Hungary and Croatia from 1563, and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from 1564 until his death.]

76 [Rudolph II (born 18 July 1552, Vienna; died 20 January 1612, Prague), Holy Roman Emperor (1576-1612), king of Hungary and Croatia (as Rudolf I, 1572-1608), king of Bohemia (1575-1608/1611) and Archduke of Austria (1576-1608); an ineffectual ruler whose mistakes led directly to the Thirty Years’ War, a great and influential patron of Northern Mannerist art, and a devotee of occult arts and learning that helped seed the scientific revolution.]

77 [Academy of Leiden, present-day Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands, founded in 1575 by William I, Prince of Orange (born 24 April 1533; died 10 July 1584).]

78 [Joseph Justus Scaliger (born 5 August 1540, Agen; died 21 January 1609, Leiden), a Dutch religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish, and ancient Egyptian history.]

79 Clusius died in 1609 [see note 73, above], a few days after Scaliger. [M. de St.-Agy]

80 [Rariorum plantarum historia, Antwerp: Johannes Moretum, 1601, [11] + 364 + cccxlviii + [11] p.]

81 [Exoticorum libri decem, quibus animalium, plantarum, aromatum, aliorumque peregrinorum fructuum historiae describuntur, Leiden: Raphelengii, 1605, [16] + 378 + [8] + 52 + [27] p.; a sequel to Clusius’s Rariorum plantarum historia of 1601 (see notes 73 and 80, above), important for the number of new descriptions of non-European plants (and some animals), among which is the first published record and illustration of a South African plant.]

82 This animal [a fruit bait or flying fox, a member of the genus Pteropus] is three feet wide when it spreads its wing membranes. It is likely that this weird creation of nature fed the imagination of the Ancients to originate the harpies [in Greek mythology, a harpy is one of the winged spirits best known for constantly stealing all the food from Phineus; the literal meaning of the word seems to be “that which snatches”]. Indeed the wings, teeth, claws, voracity, filth, in fact all the ugly attributes and harmful powers of the harpies fit quite well with the flying fox bat. [M. de St.-Agy]

83 [Penguins, a group of some twenty species of aquatic, flightless birds of the family Spheniscidae, living almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere, especially in Antarctica; why Cuvier described them as unable to walk must reflect how little was known about them at the time.]

84 [Calao, see note 63, above.]

85 [Lithophytes, plants that grow in or on rocks, which feed off nutrients from rain water and nearby decaying plants, including their own dead tissue.]

86 [Madrepores are stony corals, often forming reefs or islands in tropical locations.]

87 [Gorgonian coral or gorgonians, an order of sessile colonial cnidarians found throughout the oceans of the world, especially in the tropics and subtropics, also known as sea whips or sea fans.]

88 [Alcyon or Halcyon, a genus of kingfishers, passerine birds of the family Halcyonidae.]

89 [Spermaceti, a white, waxy substance consisting of various esters of fatty acids, found most often in the head cavities of the sperm whale (but present also in small quantities in the oils of other whales); said to control buoyancy or act as a focusing apparatus for the whale’s sense of echolocation, it is used chiefly in cosmetics and candles, and as an emollient.]

90 [Chimaera, a genus of cartilaginous fishes of the order Chimaeriformes, known informally as the ratfishes or rabbitfishes; one of the oldest and most enigmatic groups of living fishes, their closest living relatives are the sharks and rays.]

91 [Tetraodon, a genus of bony fishes of the pufferfish family (Tetraodontidae); widely distributed from Africa to Southeast Asia, the group includes both marine, brackish water, and freshwater species.]

92 [Diodon, a genus of bony fishes of the family Diodontidae, commonly known as porcupinefishes; like pufferfishes (see note 91, above) they can inflate themselves, making their spines stand perpendicular to the skin, thus posing a major difficulty to their predators.]

93 [White-spotted boxfish, Ostracion meleagris, a common and wide-spread species of the family Ostraciidae, widely distributed throughout the Indo-Pacific and Eastern Pacific oceans.]

94 [Ostracion, a genus of the boxfish family (Ostraciidae), containing about eight species and characterized by having the body covered with solid, immovable bony plates.]

95 [Novus orbis seu descriptio Indiae occidentalis, libri XVIII, novis talulis geographicis et variis animantium, plantarum fructuumque iconibus illustrata, Leiden: Ludovicum and Danielem Elzevirios, 1633, 690 p., illus., in-folio.]

96 [Trichiurus, a genus of bony fishes of the family Trichiuridae, commonly known as the cutlassfishes, having a long, slender body and a steely blue or silver coloration, thus giving rise to the name; also known as scabbardfishes or hairtails, they are world.] found throughout tropical and temperate waters around the world]

97 [Johann Eusebius Nieremberg or Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (born 1595, Madrid; died 7 April 1658, Madrid), a Spanish Jesuit and mystic who joined the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1614, and subsequently became lecturer on scripture at the Jesuit seminary in Madrid, a position which he held until his death.]

98 [Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, libri XVI, distincta. ignota indiarum animalia, quadrupedes, aves, pisces, reptilian, insect, zoophyte, plantae, metalla, lapides, & alia mine-ralia, fluviorumque & elementorum conditions, etiam cumsissimae quaestiones disputantur, ac plura sacrae Scriptu-proprietatibus medicinalibus, describuntur; novae & curio-rae loca erudite enodantur. Accedunt de miris & miraculosis naturis in Europâ libri duo: item de iisdem in terrâ Hebraeis promissâ liber unus, Antwerp: Balthasaris Moreti, 1635, [4] + 502 + [104] p.]

99 [Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimentel Ribera y Velasco de Tovar, Count of Olivares and Duke of San Lúcar la Mayor, Grandee royal favorite of Philip IV and prime minister from 1621 to of Spain (born 6 January 1587; died 22 July 1645), a Spanish 1643. He over-exerted Spain in foreign affairs and unsuccessfully attempted domestic reform; his policies of committing the Thirty Years’War (1618-1648) and his attempts to cen-Spain to recapture Holland led to his major involvement intralize power and increase wartime taxation led to revolts in Catalonia and in Portugal which brought about his fall.]

100 [Philip IV of Spain (born 8 April 1605, Valladolid; died 17 September 1665, Madrid), King of Spain (as Philip IV in Castille and Philip III in Aragon) and Portugal as Philip III. He ascended the thrones in 1621 and reigned in Spain until his death and in Portugal until 1640; he is best remembered for his patronage of the arts, including such artists as Diego Velazquez, and his rule over Spain during the challenging period of the Thirty Years’ War.] He did not deserve the title of Great that Olivarez [see note 99, above] gave him when he ascended the throne. Thus, someone jokingly gave him this motto: the more we take away from him, the greater he gets. [M. de St.-Agy]

101 [Gil Blas, a picaresque novel by Alain-Rene Lesage (French novelist and playwright; born 6 May 1668, died 17 November 1747) published between 1715 and 1735, considered to be the last masterpiece of the picaresque genre.]

102 [Sarigue or zarigueya is Didelphis, a genus of marsupials of the family Didelphidae, including six species, commonly known as opossums, among which are two American species, the South American opossum, Didelphis marsupialis, and the Virginia or North American opossum, Didelphis virginiana.]

103 [Viscachas or vizcachas, rodents of the genera Lagidium and Lagostomus of the family Chinchillidae; closely related to chinchillas, they look similar to rabbits, apart from their longer tails.]

104 [For coendou, see note 39, above.]

105 [Thomas Pennant (born 14 June 1726, Flintshire, Wales; died 16 December 1798, Flintshire), a Welsh naturalist, traveler, writer, and antiquarian. As a naturalist he had a great curiosity, observing the geography, geology, plants, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes around him and recording what he saw and heard. He wrote acclaimed books including British Zoology (London: Benjamin White, 1776-1777, 4 vols bound in 6), the History of Quadrupeds (London: John Monk, 1781, [xxiv] + 566 + [xii] p.), Arctic Zoology (London: Henry Hughs, 1784-1787, 2 vols bound in 4), and Indian Zoology (London: Robert Faulder, 1790, [2] + viii + [2] +161 p., pls, in-4°). Although he never traveled beyond continental Europe, he knew and maintained correspondence with many of the scientific figures of his day. As an antiquarian, he amassed a considerable collection of art and other works, largely selected for their scientific interest. Many of these works are now housed at the National Library of Wales.]

106 [Apparently a reference to one of Linnaeus’s favorite pets, a raccoon (see note 107, below) that he named Sjupp, which, after its death, he dissected and described in detail, in 1747, in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences; see Lesson 2, note 112; see also Volume 1, Lesson 7, note 34.]

107 [Raccoon (Procyon lotor), well known for its habit of dousing food items; they are often observed to pick up food with their front paws to examine it and rub the item, sometimes to remove unwanted parts, which gives the appearance of the raccoon “washing” their food. Captive raccoons douse their good more frequently when a watering hole with a layout similar to a stream is not farther away than three meters. The widely accepted theory is that dousing in captive raccoons is a fixed action pattern from the dabbling behavior performed when foraging at shore for aquatic food. This is supported by the observation that aquatic foods are doused more frequently. Cleaning dirty food does not seem to be a reason for “washing.”]

108 [Francisco López de Gómara (born c. 1511, Gomara; died c. 1566, probably Seville), Spanish historian who worked in Seville, particularly noted for his description of the early sixteenth-century expedition undertaken by Hernan Cortes in the Spanish conquest of the New World. Although Gomara himself did not accompany Cortes, and had in fact never been to the Americas, he had first-hand access to Cortes and others of the returning conquistadores as the sources of his account.]

109 [Vicugna, a genus containing two South American camelids, the vicuña and the alpaca.]

110 [Marmoset, the name for an assemblage of twenty-two species of New World monkeys of the genera Callithrix, Cebuella, Callibella, and Mico; all four genera are part of the monkey family Callitrichidae. The term marmoset is also used in reference to the closely related Goeldi’s marmoset, Callimico goeldii.]

111 [For Aldrovandi, see Lesson 4, above.]

112 [This Cassowary without a casque must be a species of Rhea, a genus of ratite (flightless birds) native to South America and containing two living species: the Greater or American Rhea, Rhea americana, and the Lesser or Darwin’s Rhea, Rhea pennata.]

113 [John Jonston or Joannes Jonstonus (born 15 September 1603, Szamotuły, Poland; died 8 June 1675, Legnica, Poland), a Polish naturalist and physician, best known for his compendium of the animal kingdom, first issued in Frankfurt by Matthaeus Merian (see note 117, below) from 1649 to 1653 and considered the standard zoological encyclopedia of its era, combining works on quadrupeds, birds, insects, aquatic life, and reptiles. The work consists of 1,504 printed pages, 324 tables, and about 3,000 drawings, in six separate books, each with its own title page and pagination: Historiae naturalis de piscibus et cetis libri V, 1649; Historiae naturalis de avibus libri VI, 1650; Historiae naturalis de exanguibus aquaticis libri IV, 1650; Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri, 1652; Historiae naturalis de serpentibus libri II, 1653; Historiae naturalis de insectis libri III, 1653. A second edition, in which all six parts are combined in a single large volume, was produced by Johann Jacob Schipper, in Amsterdam, in 1657, in-folio.]

114 [Thaumatographia naturalis, in decem classes distincta, in quibus admiranda I. Coeli. II. Elementorum. III. Meteororum. IV. Fossilium. V. Plantarum. VI. Avium. VII. Quadrupedum. VIII. Exanguium. IX. Piscium. X. Hominis, Amsterdam: Guiliemum Blaeu, 1632, [12] + 501 + [3] p., in-12.]

115 [On the contrary, Jonston’s work was first published in six separate volumes, some with different titles and contents than those given here by Cuvier; see note 113, above.]

116 [Salviani, Belon, Gessner, Rondelet, and Aldrovandi, the great Renaissance ichthyologists; see Lesson 3, above.]

117 [Matthaeus Merian the Elder (born 22 September 1593, Basel; died 19 June 1650, Bad Schwalbach, near Wiesbaden), a Swiss-born engraver who worked in Frankfurt for most of his career, where he also ran a publishing house; he was the father of the famous naturalist and illustrator Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (born 2 April 1647, Frankfurt; died 13 January 1717, Amsterdam).]

118 [For Aristotle, Pliny, Aelian, see Volume 1, parts 3 and 5.]

119 [The yale or centicore, a mythical beast found in European mythology and heraldry; most descriptions depict it as an antelope- or goat-like, four-legged creature with large horns that it can swivel in any direction. First mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (see Volume 1, Lesson 13), the creature then passed into medieval bestiaries and heraldry.]

120 [The carnivorous bull, a mythical and extremely ferocious breed of bull native to Ethiopia (sub-Saharan Africa), whose red hides were believed to be impervious to weapons, a story probably derived from accounts of the African buffalo; it was first described by Pliny the Elder and later by Aelian (see Volume 1, Lessons 13 and 15).]

121 [A reference to the well-known account of a sperm whale beached on the Dutch coast in the late sixteenth century; the inscription accompanying the famous engraving reads: “A large whale, thrown up out of the blue sea (gods, let it not be a bad omen!), washed up on the beach near Katwijk. What a terror of the deep ocean is a whale, when it is driven by the wind and its own power on to the shore of the land and lies captive on the dry sand. We commit this creature to paper and we make it famous, so that the people can talk it about it.”]

122 [For the first and second editions of Jonston’s Historiae naturalis, see note 113, above; the Heidelberg edition was published from 1755 to 1767 by Franciscus Josephus Eckebrecht under a different title: Ioannis Ionstoni Theatrum universale omnium animalium.]

123 [Theatrum universale omnium animalium, piscium, avium, quadrupedum, exanguium aquaticorum, insectorum et angium, Amsterdam: Rudolph & Gerard Wetstein, 1718, 6 parts in 2 vols, in-folio, edited by Hendrik Ruysch (born c. 1663, died 1727), son of the famous physician and anatomist Frederik Ruysch (born 23 March 1638, The Hague; died 22 February 1731, Amsterdam).]

124 [Hendrik Ruysch, see note 123, above.]

125 [Francois Valentijn (born 17 April 1666, Dordrecht; died 1727, The Hague), a Dutch minister and naturalist, author of a great Dutch work, in five volumes in folio, printed at Dordrecht by Joannes van Braam and Amsterdam by Gerard Onder de Linden, from 1724 to 1726, titled Oud en nieuw Oost-Indien: vervattende een naaukeurige en uitvoerige verhandelinge van Nederlands mogentheyd in die gewesten, benevens eene wydluftige beschryvinge der Moluccos, Amboina, Banda, Timor, en Solor, Java, en alle de eylanden onder dezelve landbestieringen behoorende: het Nederlands comptoir op Suratte, en de levens der Groote Mogols...]

126 [Louis Renard (born 1678 or 1679, Charlemont, France; died 1746, Amsterdam), bookdealer, publisher, and agent in Amsterdam of the British Crown, author of Poissons écrevisses et crabes, de diverses couleurs et figures extraordaires, que l’on trouve autour des isles Moluques, et sur les côtes des Terres Australes, Amsterdam: Louis Renard, 1719, 2 parts in 1 vol., 100 color pls, in-folio.]

127 [Dendographias sive historiae naturalis de arboribus et fructicibus, tam nostri quam peregrini orbis, libri decem, figuris aeneis adornati, Frankfurt: Matthaeus Merian, 1662, [20] + 477 + [31] p., ill., engrav.; a work of 528 pages containing descriptions of about 2,000 trees, classified into ten groups.]

128 [Notitia regni vegetabilis, seu Plantarum a veteribus observatarum, in suas classes redacta series, Leipzig: Viti Jacob Trescher, 1661, [22] + 331 +[1] p.; a catalog of plants.]

129 [Notitia regni mineralis, seu Subterraneorum catalogus, cum praecipuis differentiis, Leipzig: Viti Jacob Trescher, 1661, 101 p., index, in-duodecimo; a work on mineralogy, the first part of which focuses on gases and water, and on earthquakes; the second part treats mineral substances, which the author divides into five groups: soils, solidified juices (e.g., halite, saltpeter, alum, vitriol, and sulfur), bitumens (e.g., kerosene, asphalts, and amber), stones, and ores.]

130 [The full title of Jonston’s “universal history” (a textbook meant to facilitate the learning of history that focuses on the most important countries, starting at the beginning of the world and ending with the year 1633) is Historiae universalis civilis et ecclesiasticae, res praecipuas ab orbe condito ad annum MDCXXXIII gestas brevissime exhibens, Leiden: Concinnatum in usum gymnasii comitatu Lesnesis, 1633; but we have been unable to locate a 1663 edition as mentioned by Cuvier. A second edition (Editio secunda, aucta & emendata) was published by Georgius van der Marse, Leiden, in 1638; subsequent editions appeared in 1641, 1644, and 1667.]

131 [Polyhistor seu rerum ab exortu universi ad nostra usque tempora, per Asiam, Africam, Europa et Americam in sacris et profanis gestarum succincta et methodica series, Jena: Viti Jacob Trescher, 1660, [8] + 814 + [2] p.; a much expanded, five-volume revision of his Historiae universalis (see note 130, above).]

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Legenda ElephantPlate from Jonston’s Historia naturalis… (1640) Cliché Bibliothèque centrale, MNHN.
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