Today’s Random Illustrations of the Day come from a remarkable Latin work by one of the most learned men in history, the Historia Animalium by Conrad Gessner. A Swiss naturalist, bibliographer, philologist, and physician, Gessner, born #OnThisDay in 1516, deserves to be classed with Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, and Samuel Johnson as one of the most learned men of all time. Dubbed “The German Pliny” (after the indefatigable Roman encyclopedist) and “the greatest naturalist the world had seen since Aristotle,” Gessner wrote some 80 works including, at age 29, a bibliography listing virtually all of the published writings to be found in Europe up to his time, a history of plants other botany books built on for the next 200 years; at 39, a book analyzing the world’s languages; and the 1,200 page Historia Animalia (History of Animals), which can be read here, assuming you can read Latin (mammals)(birds)(reptiles)(insects)(serpents).

If, like Shakespeare, you have “little Latin and no Greek,” you can at least peruse the pictures at those links or by clicking on the gallery below. There are two very good biographical essays about Gessner which are the sources for most of my information here: one in Fraser’s Magazine of Town and Country and another attached to the beginning of The Natural History of Horses by Charles Hamilton Smith.

Note: These images are in the public domain. For more information, see A Primer on Image Rights on OBA.