Aristotle, whose works on Natural History have descended to us in a very imperfect condition, lived in 385-322 B.C., and it was not till A.D. 79 that the _Historia Naturalis_ of Pliny the Elder the next great work, which has survived till our days, was completed, and by some of those most competent to form a judgment the additions which he made were not in all cases improvements. Other writers followed, but their productions were of little value, and it was not till the year 1544 that William Turner published at Cologne what Professor Newton describes as "the first commentary on the birds mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny conceived in anything like the spirit that moves modern Naturalists." Turner's book is very rare and unfortunately at present beyond the reach of most modern students. No attempt at systematic arrangement, as now understood, was made until the _Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux_ of Pierre Belon (Bellonius) appeared at Paris in 1555, for the much greater work of Conrad Gesner, being the third book of his _Historia Animalium_, which was published at Zurich in the same year, and treated of Birds, followed, more or less closely, an alphabetical plan which brought upon him the censure of Aldrovandus, three of whose sixteen folio volumes forming the _Historia Naturalium_ bore the title of _Ornithologiæ hoc est de Avibus Historiæ, Libri XII._, and were brought out at Bologna between the years 1599 and 1603. The _Historia Naturalis_ of John Jonston, or "Jonstonus" (1603-1675), originally published in four sections between the years 1649 and 1653, ran through several editions, and was a popular book in the seventeenth century; it is frequently referred to by Browne, but is a work of very little originality. Though all these authors undoubtedly influenced their successors, it may be fairly said that it was Browne's contemporaries and fellow-countrymen, Francis Willughby and John Ray, who laid the first solid foundation of systematic zoology in their _Ornithologia_ and _Historia Piscium_, published in 1676 and 1686 respectively; but dying in 1682, Browne was indebted to neither of them, though he doubtless exercised much influence over them, and he had to use the clumsy descriptive terminology then in vogue.[C] Let me illustrate this by a single example. In one of his letters to Merrett he names a "little elegant sea plant" (probably _Halecium halecinum_, a species of Hydroid Zoophyte), "_Fucus marinus vertebratus pisciculi spinum referens ichthyorachius_, or what you think fit." On another occasion Merrett thus expresses his approval of Browne's efforts in this direction: "You have very well named the _rutilus_ and expressed fully the cours to bee taken in the imposition of names, viz: the most obvious and most peculiar difference to the ey or any other sens." We can hardly conceive the difficulties these pioneers of Natural Science had to contend with; the works of their predecessors were so indefinite as to be of little