In recent years, the marine museum book "Sea Mistake Map" painted by nie huang of the Qing Dynasty has been loved by many readers with its curious painting style and interesting captions. Many readers were amazed that the Qing Dynasty could create such works in the style of modern naturalist books. However, although the book dates back to the Kangxi Dynasty of the Qing Dynasty, it is not the earliest aquatic animal chronicle in China. In the eighteenth century, the Swede Carl von Linnaeus published The Natural System, the first regional economic zoology in the Western world to use modern taxonomic systems to divide organisms. But if you turn your gaze to the East, you will find that more than a century before the publication of Natural Systems, during the Ming Dynasty, China gave birth to a zoology with a similar taxonomic approach, titled "Minzhonghai Mistakes", written by Tu Benyi (pronounced "Jun").
In the word sea mistake, "wrong" means a variety of types and miscellaneous, so "sea error" refers to marine life
Tu Benyi was born in a noble family, and his father Tu Dashan served successively as the governor of Chuanhu during the Jiajing period, the attendant of the Nanjing Army, and the inspector of Ying Tian, and later he was able to inherit his father's shadow and be ranked in the temple. Probably under the influence of his father, who loved Huang Lao's doctrine, Tu Benyi was not contaminated with extravagance and lavishness because of the superior family conditions, and his desire for fame and fortune was not strong, and the only thing that could make him sleep and forget to eat and devote himself to it was reading. In his later years, someone once asked him if he would be depressed because he was dying of old age, and he replied: "I am in the book, hungry for food, thirsty for drink, understretched as a pillow, sad to be preached, not bitter", which shows the weight of reading in his heart, so it is not surprising that the General Association of the Tu Ancestral Hall uses "books thirsty for drinking, until the old man still has a volume" as a link to commemorate him.
The advantage of reading a wide range of books is that it can give people a broad range of knowledge, which is especially evident in Tu Benjie, who has studied many fields. Among his many works: there is the "Bottle History And Moon Table" that deals with the theory of Chinese flower arrangement, there is the "Ming Flute" that studies tea art, there are botanical works "Wild Vegetable Notes" and "Leaving the Herb Supplement", there is also the economic work "Mountain Forest Economic Book" that teaches how to manage a hermit life, and even some scholars have found that the prologue author of "Jin Ping Mei Ci Zhi" "Xin Xinzi" may also be a pseudonym of Tu Ben. However, if we want to talk about Tu Benyi's masterpiece, it must be a zoology that records the morphology, distribution, habits and other information of various aquatic animals along the Fujian coast - "The Mistakes of the Fujian Central Sea".
Tu Ben 畯, also spelled Uncle Tian, also spelled 豳叟, hanpi, in his later years called himself Mr. Huan and Qilong Zhangren
According to the text at the end of the book, Tu Benyu's motivation for writing the book was because before he went to the post of Tongzhi of the Salt Transport Department in Fujian Province, Yu Yinzhi, who was then the Secretary of Taichang Shaoqing, entrusted him to write a book about the seafood of Fujian and Yue, so he had the idea of writing in order to "have a strange reply and ask the question of the transcribe". However, according to the preface of the book, Tu Benyi himself also believes that the aquarium is "too many to count and push, and the large is difficult to measure", so he wants to use his knowledge to "correct the shape" of the aquatic creatures, so that future generations can "search for the treasures of the land and the sea, and release the heat of the Dragon Palace". In this way, Tu Benyu should have planned to write a book, and Yu Yinzhi's commission was only one of the factors that contributed to the birth of this book.
Tu Ben Ishi Self-Prologue
The "Misplaced In the Middle Sea of Fujian" that can be seen today is basically a version of the "Four Libraries of the Whole Book", and the reason why Ji Xiaolan and others will include this book is that this book has a "relatively prepared narrative" of aquatic animals in fujian waters. Completeness is a major feature of this book. According to statistics, in a total of three volumes of "MinzhongHai Staggered", the first two volumes record 167 species of scaly organisms; the last volume has 90 kinds of mesobu organisms and "sea flour" and "bird's nest" produced in Fujian but commonly found in Fujian seas. These more than 200 species of organisms not only cover a variety of common freshwater and marine fish, but also arthropods, molluscs, amphibians and so on. In addition to the abundant number of organisms included, what makes this book stand out from the group books is the more scientific and advanced biological division method used in the book.
Sea flour, the egg group belt of the blue-spotted sea hare of the sea hare family, eats the heat and nourishes the yin, soft and firm to eliminate phlegm, and is often used to cook soup
In his preface to the book, the Ming Dynasty's Zhou Yixian stated that aquatic animals were "different from each other and difficult to remember", so that since ancient times, few books have been able to "list their names in Millisu and Xiao Qi's cat in Danqing". It was not until the appearance of "Minzhonghai Mistakes" that the world truly achieved "a treasure of land and sea, the strangeness of the Dragon Palace, all in the palm of the hand". Although this statement is exaggerated, it is true.
The book divides aquatic animals into two types: scaly and meso, namely scaly animals and carapace animals. In the second part, it is subdivided into dozens of sub-categories such as crabs, snails, clams, shrimp and toads, and then these sub-categories are further divided into specific organisms. For example, at the beginning of the first volume of "Scales", Tu Benqi classified the three kinds of fish of carp, crucian carp and bream according to their appearance, and then subdivided into several specific species such as yellowtail, golden carp, black carp, and golden carp in these three categories. Although this method is slightly rough, if you look at the division method of modern biology, in fact, these fish belong to the carp family, which shows that this division method is indeed practical. Since modern animal taxonomy did not begin to appear until the eighteenth century, the taxonomy used by Tu Benyi in the sixteenth century in the "Misplaced Sea of Minzhong" was extremely advanced in that era.
Golden crucian carp, also known as red crucian carp, Japanese called crimson carp, belongs to the phylum chordates, spokefin fish, cyprinids
Another major feature of "Minzhonghai Mistakes" is that the text is concise and vivid, and Zhou Yixian commented that the writing in the book is "timeless and tasteful".
In describing the "catfish", Tu Benyi wrote: "The head is long and narrow, the abdomen is thin and plump, the fish is multi-sided, and the ridge is like a blade, so it is called a knife"; and in the "mudskipper", he writes: "The mud paint, as big as the thumb, the beard, the green spot, the raw mud hole." At night, the head of the donkey is facing north, and a jumping fish. Sea creatures are not known as clouds: Dengwu Jieruo monkey, hence the name mud monkey". From the above example, it can be seen that when Describing the shape of animals, Tu Benyi uses very concise text, but it can accurately grasp the characteristics of animals.
The Chinese nation is a foodie nation, and when seeing a novel animal, it often involuntarily asks the "three questions of foodies", that is, "Can you eat it?" Does it taste good? How to eat? ”。 As a qualified animal science book written by Chinese, "Minzhonghai Mistakes" naturally does not forget to answer these three questions. In the description of "parasitic" (that is, hermit crab), in addition to the description of the appearance of "parasitic in it, negative and walking, shaped like a stingray, four-legged and two crayons, as big as elm pods", Tu Benyi also mentioned that it "tastes like a shrimp", and told the reader that when eating, only need to use a tool to gently pick it, then the crab meat will "drag it out", and also very intimately suggested: "The fried food taste is also crisp and beautiful". Lo and behold, I'm afraid you don't know how to cook, and you've even taught you how to cook.
Stir-fry hermit crab
Of course, "Minzhonghai Mistakes" is not perfect. Because he did not have the in-depth study of animals as in later generations, Tu Benyi inevitably made jokes about animals confusing relatives when classifying animals. For example, in the shrimp category, in addition to including the shrimp girl (that is, pippi shrimp), white shrimp, shrimp, etc., he also wrote the sea centipede in it, because the reason is "sea centipede shrimp girl". However, according to modern taxonomy, the sea centipede belongs to the link animal phylum and polychaetacea, while the shrimp girl is an arthropod phylum and a soft nail class, and the gap between the two is still quite large, let alone climbing relatives.
The sea centipede is scientifically known as the sand silkworm and is often used as bait
The lack of research on animals is also reflected in the description of animal habits and other aspects. When introducing flounder, Tu Benyi described its appearance more accurately with "shaped like a cow's spleen, thin scales, purple-black, and one eye", but then added a sentence "It is necessary for two fish to be combined". As modern people, we all know that flounder does not swim vertically like ordinary fish, and its swimming method is more similar to that of batfish. However, the ancients did not know this. Because the shape of flounders is too different, the brain-opening ancients believed that they needed two fish to fit together to parade, otherwise they could not advance half a step, which is somewhat similar to the myth and legend of male and female winged birds flying side by side. This concept has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people since a long time ago, and even the Classic of Mountains and Seas can be seen in the relevant records. Therefore, Tu Benyi believes that flounder "must combine two fish to do it", which is also based on this concept.
Flounders have a flattened body with eyes that grow only on one side of the body, with an asymmetrical structure unique to fish
But compared with the above shortcomings, the biggest regret of this book is the lack of illustrations. If you rely on words alone, even if the shape of the animal is described accurately, the picture generated in the mind of the person who has not seen the animal will be more or less different, which is not conducive to the effective dissemination of information. And the lack of accompanying pictures will also make the reading of such zoology less interesting, which is also the reason why the popularity of "MinzhongHai Wrong" is far less than that of "Sea Fault Map".
But in any case, as a zoology born in the sixteenth century, the advanced nature of "The Mistakes of the Sea in Fujian" cannot be erased. Starting from the biological characteristics of animals, distinguishing and classifying them is an important way to classify animals in modern times, and It is really valuable that Tu Benyi can accurately divide various aquatic animals to such a degree without systematically learning this classification method, only by virtue of his profound knowledge and careful observation of entities. It is no wonder that the "Four Libraries of the Whole Book" will evaluate this book as "distinguishing the name category, seeing it at a glance, which is quite beneficial to more knowledge, and also considering that real estate developers do not abolish it". More importantly, the book also establishes a concept of "meticulous division of living things", which represents an important step toward natural taxonomy by ancient Chinese scholars and the reason why the book is immortal.
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