BRÜCKNER, John.

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A Philosophical Survey of the Animal Creation, An Essay. First edition in English of the author's study of animal life and populations, originally published in Dutch at Leiden in 1767. The popularity of Brückner's work spanned the Atlantic: a copy is recorded in Thomas Jefferson's zoological library. In this work, John Brückner (1726-1804), a Lutheran minister originally from Zeeland, synthesises information from a vast range of sources to argue that the natural world is essentially ordered, in spite of its apparent wastefulness. Brückner constructs an elaborate justification for the existence of predators and scavengers, contending that such creatures regulated the numbers of other species and so enabled the greatest number of species and individuals to exist - an outcome which he understood as the ultimate good in nature. The translation was undertaken by Thomas Cogan (1736-1818), a physician and philosopher, who published from 1800-13 a highly unorthodox history of animal passions.

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