Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 2 (1898).djvu/372

340 doubt that they were mutually impressed by one another's attainments.

Gesner, for example, was careful to allude to Turner in after years in terms of sincere admiration. On quitting Zurich, the English traveller journeyed to Basle, and thence to Cologne. During his residence in the latter city, in 1544, he printed the first ornithological work that the New Learning was destined to produce. Turner was still comparatively young, probably on the right side of forty, but his scholarly taste had already induced him to apply his critical skill to the difficult task of determining the particular species of birds described by Aristotle and Pliny. Accordingly, he entitled his little book, 'Avium præcipuarum quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentio est, brevis et succincta historia ex optimis quibusque scriptoribus contexta.' Trifling as this may appear beside the ponderous tomes of Gesner and Aldrovandus, the fact remains that it forms no unimportant contribution to the science of the sixteenth century. Indeed, Gesner quoted every line that Turner printed, only adding the contents of such private letters as passed between his friend and himself in the interval between 1544 and 1555. It was, by the way, in 1550 that the Privy Council unsuccessfully nominated Turner for election as Provost of Oriel College, Oxford. The fact deserves notice, because Oriel was destined to be Gilbert White's college. But however bitterly Turner may have felt the loss of this and other expected preferment, he found consolation in his zoological pursuits, and was always ready to amplify a previous statement from his latest experience. Thus he early pointed out the distinctions which appeared to separate the Black Kite (Milvus migrans) from the Red Kite (M. ictinus), stating that the Kites which he had met with in Britain were larger and redder than the Kites which he had seen in Germany; adding that, while the Red Kites frequented towns and cities, in which they became so bold as to snatch food out of the hands of children, the lesser and blacker species rarely appeared in the vicinity of towns. He is at pains to explain that, though he had very often seen the Black Kite in Germany (probably in the valley of the Rhine), he had never met with it in Great Britain. He returned to the subject in a later letter to Gesner, in which he makes the following statement (literally rendered):—"We have