in California, Germany, Nova Zelina.” The influence of Pliny is of immense weight with the writers of mediæval days, and even when the well-used formula “as Pliny saith,” is not given, anyone who is familiar with his labours will have no difficulty in recognizing the utilization of his material by his successors. Thus Pliny tells us that many wonderful things which he specifies are to be found in Ethiopia, hence Ethiopia has been discovered by many subsequent writers to be a marvellous land, and the wondrous things they detail of it have strange similarity with those of the older writer. This need not in all cases imply plagiarism; if a writer five hundred years ago, in describing the Bay of Naples, introduced a volcano into his description, we do not resent all subsequent writers on the subject also seeing it, but when an ancient writer introduces a rank impossibility, and subsequent writers see that too, we may reasonably assume that they have been borrowing. As an illustration we may mention that we read in the pages of Pliny of single-footed men who possess this solitary feature of so gigantic a size that its owner utilizes it as a sunshade. Hence these people appear from time to time in the pages of divers travellers. Maundevile, for instance, without acknowledgment of the source of his information, which he allows us to think is the result of his personal observation, tells us that “in Ethiope ben many dyverse folk,” and goes on to specify that “in that Contree ben folk that have but on foot: and thei gon so fast that it is marvayle, and the foot is so large that it schademethe all the Body agen the Sonne whanne thei wole lye and reste hem.” That Pliny was at times imposed upon by his informants is sufficiently obvious from the illustration that we have given, but when all deductions have been made his work was a very wonderful and valuable one, and a monument of painstaking industry, intellectual power and enormous erudition. The great naturalist Cuvier, no mean authority, calls it “one of the most precious monuments that have come down to us from ancient times.” Buffon, no mean authority either, writes: “It is, so to say, a compilation from all that had been written before his time: a record of all that was excellent or useful: but his record has in it features so grand, this compilation contains matter grouped in a manner so novel, that it is preferable to most of the original works that treat upon similar subjects.” Seeing that it is the _fons et origo_ of so much subsequent work, we may well devote some little space to its consideration, for mediæval natural history is largely Pliny, either frankly acknowledged, boldly appropriated without acknowledgment, or at least the nucleus around which other observations of more or less value are gathered.