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History. His work is a popular success, and the birds
are accurate though not sys-tematically arranged. Edwards also prepares a catalogue of Sir Hans Sloane’s collection. |
| 1751–1772 |
The Frenchman Denis Diderot writes his encyclopedia (in the book, see the Mezzanine). |
| 1756 |
Sir Hans Sloane, a British naturalist and collector, helps finance the work of
Mark Catesby. By 1756 his avian collection surpasses all others in Europe save
René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur’s. On January 15, 1759, his library and
avian collection of 1,172 items, including bird parts and eggs, opens to the pub
lic as the British Museum. |
| 1758 |
Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish physician, professor, naturalist, and botanist, publishes the 10th edition of Systema naturae in 1758. Organized according to two-part Latin names, it marks the o;cial beginning of binomial nomencla ture for birds. Linnaeus’s knowledge of birds is limited, and he does not access the superior collections of Europe. His bird coverage partially follows Francis Willughby and John Ray, who classified birds using bill, foot, and body size, a
system more natural than the one Linnaeus eventually devises. Linnaeus’s sys
tem of bird classification is also |
| © 2008 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy |
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inferior to Brisson’s, published in 1760, but Brisson’s benefits future editions of Linnaeus’s book. |
| 1760 |
René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, a French naturalist, builds the largest
avian collection in Europe (he dries birds in ovens still warm after bread bak
ing) and hires Brisson to curate it. Brisson publishes the collection catalogue
in 1760. Réaumur bequeaths the collection to the Académie des Sciences, an
instruc-tion that the king (with the support of Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de
Buffon) ignores, and it is transferred to the royal collection.
Mathurin-Jacques Brisson, a French ornithologist, publishes a six-volume cata
logue, Ornithologie, that covers all 1,500 bird species known to Western natu
ralists, plus 320 new forms found in collections. François-Nicholas Martinet
illustrates the series, which is based primarily on Réaumur’s collection, the
most complete European one to date. Brisson, curator of the Réaumur collec
tion, devises a classification system that divides birds into 115 genera (a divi
sion more accurate than Linnaeus’s) and groups them into 26 orders (20 more
than Linnaeus has), building a system more like the one in international use
today than any other devised during the next 80 years. |
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