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Updated: June 22, 2025
In this way Captain Barker became possessed of a vast number of monkish herbals, Pliny's Historia Naturalis, the Herbarum Vivas Eicones of Brunsfels, the treatises of Tragus, Fuchsius, Matthiolus, Ebn Beithar and Conrad Gesner, the Stirpium Adversaria Nova and Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia of Matthew Lobel, with the works of such living botanists as Henshaw, Hook, Grew and Malpighi.
An interesting domestic story has been preserved of GESNER, who so zealously devoted his graver and his pencil to the arts. His sensibility was ever struggling after that ideal excellence which he could not attain.
Those arts of imitation were already possessing the soul of the boy Gesner, to which afterwards it became so entirely devoted. Thus it happens that in the first years of life the education of the youth may not be the education of his genius; he lives unknown to himself and others.
GESNER declared that whatever were his talents, the person who had most contributed to develope them was his wife. She is unknown to the public; but the history of the mind of such a woman is discovered in the "Letters of Gesner and his Family."
Certain condiments are also aphrodisiacal, acting as they undoubtedly do, as powerful stimulants. Thus Tourtelle and Peyrible assure us that pepper is a provocative to venereal pleasures, while Gesner and Chappel cured an atony of the virile member of three or four years' duration, by repeated immersions of that organ in a strong infusion of mustard seed.
While GESNER gave himself up entirely to his favourite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and poetry, his wife would often reanimate a genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, and often exciting him to new productions, her sure and delicate taste was attentively consulted by the poet-painter but she combined the most practical good sense with the most feeling imagination.
I no longer wonder," he adds, "that the persons whom he assails in this way, are occasionally found dead in their beds. He is able to compress and throttle, and more than once he has so assaulted me and driven my soul into a corner, that I felt as if the next moment it must leave my body. I am of opinion that Gesner and Oecolampadius and others in that manner came by their deaths.
As from the Schools of the Law, as over against these, arise the prophets, so from the technical and applied sciences, the descriptive natural sciences, should arise the scientific thinkers, reinterpreting each his field of knowledge and giving us the pure sciences pure geometry henceforth contrasted with mere land surveying, morphology with mere anatomy, and so on; while instead of the mere concrete encyclopædia from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear.
More than one half of them had translated or edited works of Hippocrates or Galen; many of them had made important contributions to general literature, and a large proportion of them were naturalists: Leonicenus, Linacre, Champier, Fernel, Fracastorius, Gonthier, Caius, J. Sylvius, Brasavola, Fuchsius, Matthiolus, Conrad Gesner, to mention only those I know best, form a great group.
I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus, that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and carries home his apples.
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