Note 94 — MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; ANTERIOR TO HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.

This celebrated naturalist and physician, who was styled by Boerhaave, Monstrum Eruditionis, was born at Zurich in 1516: He was, probably, of the same family as that of the late Solomon Gesner the poet, who was a native of the same city, and appeared more than two centuries afterwards. Conrad Gesner was so distinguished a writer, as a naturalist, that he was called the Pliny of Germany. A splendid edition of Pliny’s Natural History, under the title of the Historia Mundi of Caius Plinius Secundus, with a dedication by Erasmus to Stanislaus Turzo, bishop of Olmutz, was printed at Basil, by Froben, so early as 1525. This copy of Pliny (which is now very rare) having been published in the vicinity of Conrad Gesner, during his youth, that circumstance may have prompted him to direct his attention to those pursuits in science, which distinguished this learned Swiss.