A significant proof of the wide-spread interest in natural history is found in the zeal which shewed itself at an early period for the collection and comparative study of plants and animals.  Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical gardens.... princes and wealthy men, in laying out their pleasure gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest possible number of different plants in all their species and varieties. (BURCKHARDT.)

Leon Battista Alberti, a man of wide theoretical knowledge as well as technical and artistic facility of all sorts, entered into the whole life around him with a sympathetic intensity that might almost be called nervous.

    At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears
    ... more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful
    landscape cured him. (BURCKHARDT.)

He defined a beautiful landscape as one in which one could see in its different parts, sea, mountain, lake or spring, dry rocks or plains, wood and valley.  Therefore he cared for variety; and, what is more striking, in contrast to level country, he admired mountains and rocks!

In Hellenism, hunting, to which only the Macedonians had been addicted before, became a fashion, and was enjoyed with Oriental pomp in the paradeisoi.  Writers drew most of their comparisons from it.  In the Renaissance, Petrarch did the same, and animals often served as emblems of state—­their condition ominous of good or evil—­and were fostered with superstitious veneration, as, for example, the lions at Florence.

Thus the growth of the natural sciences increased interest in the external world, and sensitiveness brought about a sentimental attitude towards Nature in Hellenism and in the Renaissance.

Both discovered in Nature a source of purest pleasure; the Renaissance feeling was, in fact, the extension and enhancement of the Hellenic.  Burckhardt overlooked the fact that beautiful scenery was appreciated and described for its own sake in Hellenism, but he says very justly;

The Italians are the first among modern peoples by whom the outward world was seen and felt as something beautiful....  By the year 1200, at the height of the Middle Ages, a genuine hearty enjoyment of the external world was again in existence, and found lively expression in the minstrelsy of different nations, which gives evidence of the sympathy felt with all the simple phenomena of Nature—­spring with its flowers, the green fields and the woods.  But these pictures are all foreground without perspective.

Among the Minnesingers there were traces of feeling for Nature; but only for certain stereotyped phases.  Of the individuality of a landscape, its characteristic colour, form, and light, not a word was said.

Even the Carmina Burana were not much ahead of the Minnesingers in this respect, although they deserve a closer examination.