a passage in one of his Essays in the "Vulgar Errors" condemning the obstinate adherence unto antiquity; he writes, "but the mortallist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto authority; and more especially the establishing of our belief upon the dictates of antiquity. For (as every capacity may observe) most men of ages present, so supersticiously do look upon ages past, that the authorities of one exceed the reason of the other." In another place he argues that the present should be the age of authority, seeing that we possess all the wisdom of the ancients which has come down to us, with that of our own times added. In fact, Browne's motto appears to have been "prove all things and hold fast only to that which is good."[B]

Aristotle, whose works on Natural History have descended to us in a very imperfect condition, lived in 385-322 B.C., and it was not till A.D. 79 that the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder the next great work, which has survived till our days, was completed, and by some of those most competent to form a judgment the additions which he made were not in all cases improvements. Other writers followed, but their productions were of little value, and it was not till the year 1544 that William Turner published at Cologne what Professor Newton describes as "the first commentary on the birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern Naturalists." Turner's book is very rare and unfortunately at present beyond the reach of most modern students. No attempt at systematic arrangement, as now understood, was made until the Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux of Pierre Belon (Bellonius) appeared at Paris in 1555, for the much greater work of Conrad Gesner, being the third book of his Historia Animalium, which was published at Zurich in the same year, and treated of Birds, followed, more or less closely, an alphabetical plan which brought upon him the censure of Aldrovandus, three of whose sixteen folio volumes forming the Historia Naturalium bore the title of Ornithologiæ hoc est de Avibus Historiæ, Libri XII., and were brought out at Bologna between the years 1599 and 1603. The Historia Naturalis of John Jonston, or "Jonstonus" (1603-1675), originally published in four sections between the years 1649 and 1653, ran through several editions, and was a popular book in the seventeenth century; it is frequently referred to by Browne, but is a work of very little originality. Though all these authors undoubtedly influenced their successors, it may be fairly said that it was Browne's contemporaries and fellow-countrymen, Francis Willughby and John Ray, who laid the first solid foundation of systematic zoology in their Ornithologia and Historia Piscium, published in 1676 and 1686 respectively; but dying in 1682, Browne was indebted to neither of them, though he doubtless exercised much influence over them, and he had to use the clumsy descriptive terminology then in vogue.[C] Let me illustrate this by a single example. In one of his letters to Merrett he names a "little elegant sea plant" (probably Halecium halecinum, a species of Hydroid Zoophyte), "Fucus marinus vertebratus pisciculi spinum referens ichthyorachius, or what you think fit." On another occasion Merrett thus expresses his approval of Browne's efforts in this direction: "You have very well named the rutilus and expressed fully the cours to bee taken in the imposition of names, viz: the most obvious and most peculiar difference to the ey or any other sens." We can hardly conceive the difficulties these pioneers of Natural Science had to contend with; the works of their predecessors were so indefinite as to be of little value in determining species; they had to depend upon the vague descriptions of fowlers and others; the same bird would probably be known in half a dozen different localities by as many different names, and since no satisfactory mode of preserving specimens had then been discovered, examples for comparison were not available. If inextricable confusion arose with regard to such a bird as the Osprey, well might Browne write with regard to those less readily characterized, "I confess for such little birds I am much unsatisfied on the names given to many by countrymen, and uncertaine what to give them myself, or to what classis of authors cleerly to reduce them. Surely there are many found