ed in
the same direction by the same great thoughts--coincidences which have
happened in our own day on questions of geology, biology, and astronomy;
and which, when the facts have been carefully examined, and the first
flush of natural jealousy has cooled down, have proved only that there
were more wise men than one in the world at the same time.

And this sixteenth century was an age in which the minds of men were
suddenly and strangely turned to examine the wonders of nature with an
earnestness, with a reverence, and therefore with an accuracy, with which
they had never been investigated before. "Nature," says Professor
Planchon, "long veiled in mysticism and scholasticism, was opening up
infinite vistas. A new superstition, the exaggerated worship of the
ancients, was nearly hindering this movement of thought towards facts.
Nevertheless, Learning did her work. She rediscovered, reconstructed,
purified, commented on the texts of ancient authors. Then came in
observation, which showed that more was to be seen in one blade of grass
than in any page of Pliny. Rondelet was in the middle of this crisis a
man of transition, while he was one of progress. He reflected the past;
he opened and prepared the future. If he commented on Dioscorides, if he
remained faithful to the theories of Galen, he founded in his 'History of
Fishes' a monument which our century respects. He is above all an
inspirer, an initiator; and if he wants one mark of the leader of a
school, the foundation of certain scientific doctrines, there is in his
speech what is better than all systems, the communicative power which
urges a generation of disciples along the path of independent research,
with Reason for guide, and Faith for aim."

Around Rondelet, in those years, sometimes indeed in his house--for
professors in those days took private pupils as lodgers--worked the group
of botanists whom Linnaeus calls "the Fathers," the authors of the
descriptive botany of the sixteenth century. Their names, and those of
their disciples and their disciples again, are household words in the
mouth of every gardener, immortalised, like good Bishop Pellicier, in the
plants that have been named after them. The Lobelia commemorates Lobel,
one of Rondelet's most famous pupils, who wrote those "Adversaria" which
contain so many curious sketches of Rondelet's botanical expeditions, and
who inherited his botanical (as Joubert his biographer inherited his
anatomica