Petrus Gyllius [SEP] occupation
Petrus Gyllius
Petrus Gyllius or Gillius (or Pierre Gilles) (1490–1555) was a French natural scientist, topographer and translator.
Gilles was born in Albi, southern France. He travelled and studied the Mediterranean and Orient, producing such works as "De Topographia Constantinopoleos et de illius antiquitatibus libri IV," "Cosmæ Indopleutes" and "De Bosphoro Thracio libri III," and a book about the fish of the Mediterranean Sea. Among others, he spent the years 1544 to 1547 in Constantinople, where he had
sea nettles and sponges "are neither animals nor plants, but are possessed of a third nature ("tertius natura")". Petrus Gyllius copied Pliny, introducing the term "zoophyta" for this third group in his 1535 book "On the French and Latin Names of the Fishes of the Marseilles Region"; it is popularly but wrongly supposed that Aristotle created the term. Gyllius further noted, following Aristotle, how hard it was to define what was a plant and what was an animal.
The Persian polymath