Species

Species and the Birth of Modern Science 63

Of the bestiary writers of the Reformation, Gesner is most interesting, as like

Frederick and Albert, he studied the organisms for himself. Of equal note is that he

engaged woodcuts to be made of his specimens, allowing readers to identify which

actual species he was talking about. His Historia animalium ran to 3500 pages in

four volumes, organized by Aristotelian categories of viviparous and oviparous

organisms, then birds, shes, and reptiles and insects.^60 In his Historia plantarum

(1548–1566) he summarized twenty years’ work of direct descriptions and drawings

of 1500 plants, including dissections of owers and fruit.

The formal distinction into genera and species in botany arises in the work of

Gesner, according to Arber, when he employs the practice of giving genera substan-

tive names, and Arber considers him the earliest to do so.^61 However, he was not

consistent in that nomenclature, and his work was not widely known at rst. Arber

instead regards Fabius Columna (or Fabio Colonna, 1567–1650), in his Ekphrasis

(1616), under the inuence of Cesalpino, as having published the rst views on the

nature of genera in botany, relying on ower and seed rather than the older morpholo-

gies of leaf and stem to distinguish them.^62 Columna also used woodcuts for botanical

illustration in his 1592 herbal Phytobasanos, for the rst time.

G e s n e r ’s Historia was used as the basis for Edward Topsell’s History of Four-

Footed Beasts, in which Topsell wrote in the essay “Of the Crocodile”:

Because there be many kindes of Crocodiles, it is no marvel although some have taken the

word Crocodilus for the Genus, and the several Species, they distinguish into the Crocodile

(^58) Redrawn from Sprague and Nelmes 1928/31, 557.
(^59) Classen 2001.
(^60) Nordenskiöld 1929, 93f.
(^61) Arber 1938, 166.
(^62) Arber herself, a botanist in the ideal morphology tradition, is a species “nominalist,” writing:
(^) The progression from the vague concepts of the early writers to the sharp denition of genera
and species to which we are now accustomed, has been in some ways a doubtful blessing. There
is to-day, as a recent writer has pointed out, a tendency to treat these units as if they possessed
concrete reality, whereas they are merely convenient abstractions, which make it easier for the
human mind to cope with the endless multiplicity of living things. [Arber 1938, 168f]
(^) The “recent writer” may be Senn 1925, whom she cites in her Appendix III [Arber 1938, 306].
Prima species...........
Secunda species...........................................
Tertia species..............................................
Quarta species.......... Lactea..........................
Lutea...........................
Sylvestris......................
Hortensis......
Simplex.......
Multiplex......
Ranunculus auricomus L.
R. arvensis L.
R. acris L. flore pleno.
R. scleratus L.
R. bulbosus L.
Anemone nemorosa L.
A. ranunculoides L.
FIGURE 3.4 Fuch’s classications. A representation of Fuchs’ capita and genera/species in
his “new herbal” De Historia Stirpium of 1542.^58 In other cases, he would list the primum
genus, and so on.^59