Gesner

Gesner, KONRAD VON, a Swiss naturalist, sometimes called the German Pliny, was born at Zurich, 26th March 1516. All his life long he was passionately devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, especially knowledge of the natural sciences. His early studies, in medicine, natural history, and Greek and Latin literature, were prosecuted at Zurich, Strasburg, Bourges, and Paris. Returning home in 1535, he earned his living by teaching, until in 1537 he was appointed professor of Greek at Lausanne. This chair, however, he exchanged four years later for that of Physics and Natural History at Zurich, where he taught and practised as a physician until his death, on 13th December 1565. He was also an indefatigable writer of books, and in the course of his life published no less than seventy-two works, besides leaving at his death eighteen others in progress. His Bibliotheca Universalis (1545) contained the titles of all the books then known in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, unpublished as well as published, with criticisms and summaries of each; its second part, Pantheotarium sive Partitionum Universalium Libri XXI., came out in 1548-49. His next undertaking, by far the greatest of his literary works, was the Historia Animalium (1551-58). The first book treats of viviparous quadrupeds, the second of oviparous animals (tortoises, lizards, &c.), the third of birds, and the fourth of fishes and aquatic animals. Two other books, never completed, were to have contained the history of serpents and insects. In this work, which will ever remain a monument of his untiring industry, he aimed at bringing together all that was known in his time concerning every animal. But botany was probably the section of natural history with which he had the greatest practical acquaintance. He had collected more than five hundred plants undescribed by the ancients, and was arranging the results of his labours in this department for a third magnum opus at the time of his death. He appears to have been the first who made the great step towards a scientific classification of distinguishing genera by the fructification. He also wrote on other branches of science, as medicine, mineralogy, and philology. See Hanhart's Gesner (1824).—JOHANN MATTHIAS GESNER (1691-1761), a distinguished classical scholar, editor, and educationist, published texts of Quintilian, Pliny, the Scriptores Rei Rusticae, and several chrestomathies.