Thomas Moufet wrote (for Gesner again) a book on insects, which incorporated the notes of Penny and Wotton. None of the three lived to see the printed book, which was at last put forth by Sir Thomas Mayerne in 1634. It is uncritical, confused, and illustrated by the rudest possible woodcuts. John Gerarde's _Herbal_ (1597) and Parkinson's two books of plants are more amusing than valuable. Both authors were guilty of unscrupulous plagiarism, a vice which cannot be atoned for by curious figures and bits of folk-lore, nor even by command of Shakespearean English. Thomas Johnson's edition of Gerarde (1633) is a far better book than the original; Ray called it "Gerarde emaculatus"—_i.e._, freed from its stains. The succession of influential English naturalists may be said to begin with Ray, Willughby, and Martin Lister, all of whom belong to the last half of the seventeenth century. The Rise of Experimental Physiology. 1543 is a memorable year in the history of science. Then appeared the treatise of Copernicus on the _Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies_, completed long before, but kept back for fear of the cry of novelty and absurdity which, as he explains in his preface, dull men, ignorant of mathematics, were sure to raise. The aged astronomer, paralysed and dying, was able to hold his book in his hands before he passed away. In the same year Vesalius, a young Belgian anatomist, published his _Structure of the Human Body_, a volume rich in facts ascertained by dissection. Some of these facts were held to contradict the teaching of Galen. Next year Vesalius was driven by the hostility of the medical profession to burn his manuscripts and relinquish original work; he was not yet thirty years of age.