Species

58 Species

Thus began the tradition of treating the scriptural texts realistically rather than
allegorically, in the Christian tradition. The contrast with Hugh of St. Victor’s
exposition three centuries earlier is striking. Arguably this is due to the emphasis
in Renaissance humanism of taking texts in their historical context and authorial
intent.^41
Jean Borrell, also known (after a local hawk^42 ) as Johannes Buteo (French
Catholic, 1490–1560/1572?), attempted in his tract De arca Noe to work out the size
of the Ark, the food required, and the number of kinds of animals it could contain;
he gave 93 such beasts, but not the bird kinds (Table 3.3).^43 The term he mostly uses
is genera but he does use the term species as well.
Buteo knew there were many living animals that were not included on the Ark, but
as his comment on mice (generated from corruption, what came later to be known
as “spontaneous generation”^44 ) shows, he expected some kinds to generate out of the
mud. Moreover, he is unsure if other kinds should be included, such as mules:

There are those, however, who think that mice were not brought in the ark nor anything

of that family since they are born of corruption, as they also say of mules because they

come from another kind [ex alio genere procreatur].^45

This began a tradition of calculating the logistics of the Ark, which became, over

the next century, a pressing problem, since more and more species were being

discovered.

The task was taken up by Walter Raleigh in his 1614 History of the World. Raleigh

argued that the Ark was of sufcient capacity to include the beasts (but not shes).

... it is manifest, and undoubtedly true, that many of the Species, which now seeme

differing and of severall kindes, were not then in rerum natura. For those beasts which

are of mixt natures, either they were not in that age, or else it was not needfull to

præserve them: seeing they might bee generated againe by others, as the Mules, the

Hyæna’s and the like: the one begotten by Asses and Mares, the other by Foxes and

Wolves.^46

He estimated 130 kinds of herbivores and 32 carnivores, and that all other kinds

of animals from the Americas and India (i.e., that differed from “Northerne” spe-

cies), and so on, were hybrids or varieties caused to transmute by local conditions:

(^41) For example, Lorenzo Valla’s debunking of the Donation of Constantine, in 1440, using philological
techniques. See also the inuence of rabbinic ideas in Cohn 1999, 33ff and the discussion in Pleins
2009, chapter 5.
(^42) According to Buteo 2008, he was so named due to there being a local hawk called bourrel; a Middle
Latin name for hawk is buteo. See also Shannon 2013, 270–273.
(^43) Buteo 1554; English translation in Buteo 2008, although this is a work of creationist scholars and
should be treated cautiously.
(^44) Farley 1977.
(^45) Buteo 2008, 31.
(^46) Raleigh 1614, 111–112, Bk I, Pt I, ch. 7, § 9.