Species Vallisneria aethiopica

For Antonio Vallisnieri (Vallisneri) (1661–1730), Italian physician, botanist, naturalist, biologist and professor of medicine at the University of Padua. Author of many publications on insects, including (in translation) The Curious Origin of Many Insects (1696–1670), Common Worms of the Human Body (1710), The Origin, Development and Habits of Various Insects (1713), Origin of Fountains (1715), History of the Generation of Man and Animals (1721), and Marine Bodies on Mountains – Their Origin (1728), as well as writing about the unusual, such as ostriches and chameleons. Vallisnieri was a ‘contrarian’, and abandoned reliance on medieval theories in favour of experimentation, conducting trials, observations and deductive reasoning, and he wrote his treatises in Italian rather than Latin. He was a member of the Royal Society of London.