[1] Aristotle, Cesalpini, Gesner, and Ray are among the writers who use this word or some synonym. [2] It has now been made accessible to all readers by the reprint and translation of Mr. A. H. Evans. [3] Letter of Peter Martyr, Dec. 26, 1515. [4] The extermination of the red man in North America is the most conspicuous case recorded in history. Australia and Tasmania furnish examples on a smaller scale. [5] _Le Théâtre d'Agriculture_, 1600. PERIOD II. 1661-1740 Characteristics of the Period. In Western Europe this was a time of consolidation succeeding to one of violent change. Religious wars gave place to dynastic and political wars. In France the tumults of the preceding hundred years sank to rest under the rule of a strong monarchy; order and refinement became the paramount aims of the governing classes; literature, the fine arts, and the sciences were patronised by the Court. Other nations imitated as well as they could the example of France. Learning was still largely classical, but the anti-scholastic revolt, which had first made itself felt three hundred years earlier, steadily gained ground; Descartes, Newton, and Locke were now more influential than the Aristotelians. This was an age of new scientific societies (Royal Society, Academy of Sciences of Paris, Academia Naturæ Curiosorum, etc.). The Minute Anatomists. Magnifying glasses are of considerable antiquity. Seneca mentions the use of a glass globe filled with water in making small letters larger and clearer. Roger Bacon (1276) describes crystal lenses which might be used in reading by old men or those whose sight was impaired. As soon as Galileo had constructed his first telescopes, he perceived that a similar instrument might be caused to enlarge minute objects, and made a microscope which revealed the structure of an insect's eye. Within twenty years of this date the working opticians of Holland, Paris, and London sold compound microscopes, which, though cumbrous as well as optically defective, revealed many natural wonders to the curious. Simple lenses, sometimes of high power, came before long to be preferred by working naturalists, and it was with them that all the best work of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was done.