ORIGINS OF MODERNITY

natural philosophy

Charleton, Walter (1619-1707)
Onomasticon zoicon : plerorumque animalium differentias & nomina propria pluribus linguis exponens. Cui accedunt mantissa anatomica ; et quaedam De variis fossilium generibus.
Londini : apud Jacobum Allestry ..., 1668.

Walter Charleton is best known today for his long paraphrase of the mechanical philosophy of Pierre Gassendi, known as Physiologia. He was a physician with strong royalist sympathies, a member of the Royal Society and an author. The name of the work displayed here, Onomasticon zoicon, means a dictionary of names of living things. It is a work on taxonomy and is the first English book to provide pictures of the English birds it describes and is indicative of the important role that physicians played in the study of natural philosophy. It was reissued in an expanded format in 1677 as Exercitationes de Differentiis & Nominibus Animalium.