Everything about Conrad Gessner totally explained
Konrad Gessner (Conrad Gessner, Conrad Geßner, Conrad von Gesner, Conradus Gesnerus, Conrad Gesner) (
26 March 1516 –
13 December 1565) was a
Swiss naturalist and bibliographer. His three-volume
Historiae Animalium (1551-1558) is considered the beginning of modern
zoology, and the
flowering plant genus
Gesneria (
Gesneriaceae) is named after him.
Birth and education
Born and educated in
Zürich, he was the son of a
furrier. After the death of his father at the
Battle of Kappel (1531), he was very short of money. He had good friends, however, in his old master,
Oswald Myconius, and subsequently in
Heinrich Bullinger, and he was enabled to continue his studies at the universities of
Strassburg and
Bourges (1532-1533); in Paris, he found a generous patron in the person of
Job Steiger of
Berne.
Career
In 1535, religious unrest drove him back to Zürich, where he made an imprudent marriage. His friends again came to his aid, enabled him to study at
Basel (1536), and in 1537 obtained for him the professorship of
Greek at the newly founded academy of
Lausanne (then belonging to Berne). Here he'd leisure to devote himself to scientific studies, especially
botany. In 1540-1541 he visited the famous medical university of
Montpellier, took his degree of doctor of medicine (1541) at Basel, and then settled down to practise at Zürich, where he obtained the post of lecturer in physics at the
Carolinum. There, apart from a few journeys to foreign countries, and annual summer botanical journeys in his native land, he passed the remainder of his life. He devoted himself to preparing works on many subjects of different sorts. He died of the
plague, the year after his ennoblement.
To his contemporaries he was best known as a botanist, though his botanical manuscripts were not published till long after his death (at
Nuremberg, 1751-1771, 2 vols. folio), he himself issuing only the
Enchiridion historiae plantarum (1541) and the
Catalogus plantarum (1542) in four languages. In 1545 he published his remarkable
Bibliotheca universalis (ed. by
J. Simler, 1574), supposedly a catalogue (in
Latin, Greek and
Hebrew) of all writers who had ever lived, with the titles of their works, etc. A second part,
Pandectarium sive partitionum universalium Conradi Gesneri Ligurini libri xxi, appeared in 1548; only nineteen books being then concluded. The last, a theological encyclopaedia, was published in 1549, but the last but one, intended to include his medical work, was never finished.
His great zoological work,
Historiae animalium, appeared in 4 vols. (
quadrupeds,
birds,
fishes) folio, 1551-1558, at Zürich, a fifth (
snakes) being issued in 1587 (there is a German translation, entitled
Thierbuch, of the first 4 vols., Zürich, 1563): this work is the starting-point of modern zoology. Not content with such vast works, Gessner put forth in 1555 his book entitled
Mithridates de differentis linguis, an account of about 130 known languages, with the
Lord's Prayer in twenty-two languages, while in 1556 appeared his edition of the works of
Claudius Aelianus.
To non-scientific readers, Gessner is best known for his love of
mountains (below the snow-line) and for his many excursions among them, undertaken partly as a botanist, but also for the sake of exercise and enjoyment of the beauties of nature. In 1541 he prefixed to his
Libellus de lacte et operibus lactariis a letter addressed to his friend,
J. Vogel, of
Glarus, as to the wonders to be found among the mountains, declaring his love for them, and his firm resolve to climb at least one mountain every year, not only to collect flowers, but in order to exercise his body. In 1555 Gessner issued his narrative (
Descriptio Montis Fracti sive Montis Pilati) of his excursion to the
Gnepfstein (1920 m), the lowest point in the
Pilatus chain.
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