Volume 1

The early naturalists : their lives and work (1530-1789) / by L.C. Miall.

  • Louis Compton Miall
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The early naturalists : their lives and work (1530-1789) / by L.C. Miall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    70/418 page 54
    Few of the innumerable pilgrims to the Holy Land brought home anything better than chance scraps of information about the remarkable animals and plants of Syria. Among the most enterprising was one of the latest pilgrims, Bernard de Breydenbach, a canon of Mayence, who travelled in Palestine and Arabia during 1482 and following years. He wrote an account of what he had seen,1 which is illustrated by very curious woodcuts. A painter named Bemich made one of the party, and drew several strange animals, among which was a giraffe (“ seraffa ”); no earlier portrait of this animal, taken from the life, is known. Breydenbach was probably the first traveller whose descriptions and figures were multiplied by the printing-press. Mena¬ geries, containing remarkable foreign animals, now began to be common ornaments of the courts of Italian princes. Here would come in order of time the great geo¬ graphical discoveries of Vasco da Gama and Columbus. We sha]l however defer this topic until we have tried to show by two or three examples how the new spirit of the Benaissance stirred up explorers to examine more closely the natural products of countries less distant from civilised Europe. Pierre Belon, of whose life a sketch has already been given (p. 40), visited the eastern end of the Mediterranean during the years 1546-9. In 1553 he published a little book called Les observations des plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvees en Grece, Asie, Judee, Egypte, Arabie et autres pays estranges, which was highly esteemed, passing through several editions, and being translated into Latin by the 1 Opusculum sanctarum peregrinationum, Mainz, 1486, often reprinted and translated into several modern languages before 1500. Some beautiful manu¬ script copies also exist.
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