Pliny the Elder [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 10, 66): Pelicans have a resemblance to swans, and would be thought not to differ from them at all were it not that they have a kind of second stomach in their actual throats. Into this the insatiable creature stows everything, so that its rapacity is marvelous. Afterwards when it has done plundering it gradually returns the things from this pouch into its mouth and passes them into the true stomach like a ruminant animal. These birds come to us from the extreme north of Gaul. - [Rackham translation]

It’s very rare that a book gets outthere into the world that has nothing relevant to say toanybody, but your interests may be specific enough thatit may have nothing in it you need to know.

Citing Pliny’s “no book so bad,” Gesner made a point of accumulating information about all the texts he could learn about, barbarian and Christian, in manuscript and in print, extant and not, without separating the good from the bad: “We only wanted to list them, and we have left to others free selection and judgment.”202

Humanist critiques began to erode Pliny—the major source for natural history since antiquity—in the1490s. The lengthy critiques of Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493) and Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524) were,however, based on Greek texts prior to Pliny, not on the natural world.

Pliny’s abundant reading and note-taking in one of his nephew’s letters (which I discuss in more detail below).

A number of ancient compilations, like those of Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, and Stobaeus, were indeed valued as both sources and models in the Renaissance, and authors of miscellaneously arranged compila-tions invoked Aulus Gellius as the founder of that genre.