Prepared by much study for the cultivation of his favourite pursuits, he left France in the year fifteen hundred and forty-seven, being at that time twenty-nine years of age, and travelled successively through Germany, Bohemia, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor, returning to Paris after three years absence with a large and valuable collection of plants and specimens of natural history, which he then occupied himself in arranging, preparatory to the publication of the knowledge he had acquired. The first work which he produced was a history of strange fishes and serpents, under the title “De Aquatilibus;” but, tempting as the subject is, I do not at present intend to examine it, having another of his productions before me, which (from the fact of its being a borrowed book, and liable, therefore, to sudden seizure by its owner, who otherwise would never get it back), more immediately claims my attention. This coveted volume is the celebrated History of the Nature of Birds, with their descriptions and lively portraits, taken from Nature, and written in seven books, and is, perhaps, the principal work on which is founded Peter Belon’s claim to be considered the father of modern natural history. In the preface to it he promises--and he keeps his word far better than might have been expected--that nothing shall appear in these books which is not perfectly true; there shall be no false descriptions or portraits of suppositious animals; nothing, in short, that is not to be found in nature. Appropriate to the publication of a work on ornithology, Peter Belon caused this volume to be printed, in the year fifteen hundred and fifty-five, by William Cavellat, in front of the college of Cambray, in Paris, at the sign of the Fat Hen (a sure sign that Peter Belon came from Le Mans, a city famous for its poultry); and that there should be no doubt of the latter fact, the title-page also bore the living portraiture of a domestic fowl in very high condition, enclosed within a circle, on the outer rim of which was inscribed the legend “Gallina in pingui,” an inscription that need not again be translated. A portrait of Peter Belon, as he appeared to the justly-admiring world, at the age of thirty-six, also embellished the volume. The learned physician appears to have been a man with a good, sensible, honest countenance, wearing a large Crimean beard, and having a cap on his head, the shape of which, fortunately, has not yet been adopted for the British army.