A Guide to the Study of Fishes, Volume 1 (of 2)Jordan, David Starr
History
A Guide to the Study of Fishes, Volume 1 (of 2)
Jordan, David Starr
Fishes; Fishes -- Bibliography; Zoology -- History
The followers of Linnæus are divided into two classes, explorers and
compilers. To the first class belonged his own students and others
who ransacked all lands for species to be added to the lists of the
"Systema Naturæ." Those men, mostly Scandinavian and Dutch, worked with
wonderful zeal, enduring every hardship and making great contributions
to knowledge, which they published in more or less satisfactory forms.
To these men we owe the beginnings of the science of geographical
distribution. Among the most notable of these are Pehr Osbeck and
Fredrik Hasselquist, already noted; Otto Fabricius (1744-1822), author
of an excellent "Fauna of Greenland"; Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-),
successor of Linnæus as rector of the University of Upsala, who
collected fishes about Nagasaki, intrusting most of the descriptive
work to the less skillful hands of his students, Jonas Nicolas Ahl and
Martin Houttuyn; Martin Th. Brünnich, who collected at Marseilles the
materials for his "Pisces Massiliensis"; Petrus Forskål (1736-63),
whose work on the fishes of the Red Sea ("Descriptio Animalium,"
etc.), published posthumously in 1775, is one of the most accurate
of faunal lists, and one which shows a fine feeling for taxonomic
distinctions scarcely traceable in any previous author. Georg Wilhelm
Steller (1709-45), naturalist of Bering's expedition, gathered amid
incredible hardships the first knowledge of the fishes of Alaska and
Siberia, his notes being printed after his tragic death, by Pallas and
Krascheninnikov. Petrus Simon Pallas (1741-1811) gives the account
of his travels in the North Pacific in his most valuable volumes,
"Zoographia Russo-Asiatica"; Johann Georg Gmelin (1709-55) with Samuel
Theophilus Gmelin (1745-84), and Johann Anton Güldenstädt (1745-91),
like Steller, crossed Siberia, recording its animals. Johann David
Schöpf (1752-1800), a Hessian surgeon stationed at Long Island in the
Revolutionary War, gave an excellent account of the fishes about New
York.
Still other naturalists accompanied navigators around the globe,
collecting specimens and information as opportunity offered. John
Reinhold Forster (1729-98), with his son, John George Adam Forster
(1754-94), and Daniel Solander (1736-81), a student of Linnæus,
and Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), sailed with Captain James Cook.
Philibert Commerson (1727-73) accompanied the explorer, Louis Antoine
de Bougainville, and furnished nearly all the original material used by
Lacépède. Other noted travelers of the early days were Pierre Sonnerat
and Mungo Park.
Still other naturalists, scarcely less useful, gave detailed accounts
of the fauna of their own native regions. Ablest of these was Anatole
Risso, an apothecary of Nice, who published in 1810 the "Ichthyologie
de Nice," an excellent work, afterward (1826) expanded by him into a
"Histoire Naturelle de l'Europe Méridionalé."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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