In after years, Plinius wrote on beasts, fishes, birds, and insects, and on human and comparative anatomy, but he made no great advance on Aristoteles. Then there occurred as great a gap in the study of zoology as happened in botany, and many hundreds of years elapsed before progress was made. Conrad Gesner, a Swiss, made the first great step in zoology after the ancients, and his life was a most remarkable one. A writer says of him, that he was a shining example of the truth of the remark, that those who have most to do, and are willing to work, find the most time. He was a great scholar, and a profound naturalist. He began life in extreme poverty, soon became an orphan, laboured whilst ill, and sacrificed himself for the sake of others. A son of a poor skinner and worker of hides, he was born in 1516, at Zurich, and had to suffer pinching poverty, with his numerous brothers and sisters. An uncle was kind to the boy, and began to educate him, but death stepped in and he lost his kind relation. When only thirteen years of age, Gesner was cast upon the world, his father having died fighting in the battle of Zug. The lad was seriously ill and dropsical, and his sole fortune was a little knowledge of classics, which he had picked up. Probably one of the professors at Zurich, Ammian by name, and who had instructed him, gave him introductions, for we find the lad at Strasbourg when fifteen years of age. His thoughts were to go into the Lutheran Church, and it is certain that the Lutheran Wolfgang Fabricius Capito gave him some employment, and enabled him to begin the study of Hebrew. Returning again to Zurich, the university there gave him a little pension, to enable him to travel, and he went into France to Bourges. There he taught at a school, and occupied his spare time in learning Greek and Latin. Then he went to Strasbourg again, hoping for employment, and finding none, was asked to return to Zurich, and to teach in the university. At the age of twenty he married, and, of course, much against the wishes of his friends, who do not appear to have done anything for him, except to have given gratuitous advice. Although the Church was to be the career of Gesner, he took much interest in the healing art, and resigning his position at Zurich, he went, having a small pension, to Basle as a medical student. Anxious to know the wisdom of the Greek physicians, he paid unusual attention to that language, and edited an edition of a dictionary of it. This study brought strange results, for he was offered a professorship of Greek at Lausanne, and he accepted the position. He was very young, and yet learned men found his friendship valuable. Going, subsequently, to Montpellier, he became acquainted with a naturalist named Rondelet, and he gradually began to earn enough money to be independent. So he returned to Basle, and in 1541, being twenty-five years old, took his degree in medicine. He settled in practice at Zurich, and occupied his