"... Palissy—like his contemporary Gilbert, and like Galileo who came very soon after him—was one of the chief engineers of the new paths of knowledge, and was in France the chief engineer. Indeed, astronomy and mathematics apart, he with Dodoens and Gesner were the first in Europe since Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny, to pursue modern scientific methods in the worlds of geology, botany, and zoology, and to work and teach from and with the natural objects themselves."