GESNER, KONRAD VON (i 516-1565), German-Swiss writer and naturalist, called by Cuvier "the German Pliny," was born at ZUrich. He took his M.D. at Basle in 154i, and then prac tised at Zurich, where he became lecturer in physics at the Caro linum. He died of plague on Dec. 13, 1565.
To his contemporaries he was best known as a botanist, though his botanical mss. were not published till long after his death at Nuremberg, 1751-71, he himself issuing only the Enchiridion historiae plantarum (1541) and the Catalogus plantarum (1542) in four tongues. In 1S45 he published his remarkable Bibliotheca universalis (ed. J. Simler, 1574), a catalogue (in Latin, Greek and Hebrew) of all past writers with the titles of their works, etc. A second part, Pandeclarium sive partitionum universalium Conradi Gesneri Ligurini libri xxi., with the exception of Bk. 20, appeared in 1548-49. His great zoological work, Historia animal ium, 4 vols. folio (ZUrich, 1551-58), is the starting-point of mod ern zoology. Gesner also published in 1555 his Mithridates de differentiis linguis, an account of about 13o known languages with the Lord's Prayer in 22 tongues, and his narrative (Descriptio Montis Fracti sive Montis Pilati) of his excursion to the Gnepf stein, and in 1556 his edition of the works of Aelian.
See Lives by J. Hanhart (Winterthur, 1824) and J. Simler (Zurich, 1566) ; see also Lebert's Gesner als Arzt (Zurich, 1854). A part of his unpublished writing, ed. by Schmiedel, was published at Nuremberg in