Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/548

532 appellatives have not descended to our day, since for years naturalists have been inflicting long Latin cognomens on all animals and plants coming under their observation, and it would almost seem as if the supply of names would be exhausted long before the things to be named!

Ever since the time of Adam men have enjoyed a contemplation of the created things which surround them, and have formed collections of minerals, plants, or animals, varying in size from the few "curios" on the mantel-piece of a back-country parlor to that most wonderful display contained in the British Museum. Our records of the museums of antiquity are very meager, and but little can be told concerning them. Noah's collection in the ark can hardly be considered in this connection, as it was formed with an entirely different end in view. Solomon possibly had a collection. The temple of the oracle at Delphos had many curiosities brought as votive offerings from foreign lands. Apollonius saw with surprise in India trees bearing the different kinds of nuts he had before seen in the temples of Greece. The museum at Alexandria contained the largest collection of books in antiquity, but whether it contained productions of nature is not known. Alexander the Great commanded all sailors and traders to bring the peculiar productions of the countries they visited to Aristotle; Apuleius made a collection of the fossils of the Gætulian Alps; while the Emperor Augustus had a large cabinet of curiosities from all parts of the then known world.

One reason why the ancients were deficient in museums was the lack of efficient methods of preserving the various forms of life: covering a body with wax or honey was not the best manner imaginable of rendering an object either interesting or instructive; and so it was that not until the discovery of alcohol and the manufacture of glass bottles that museums became of much importance. Another fact that also had much to do with the entire absence of any collection from the third until the sixteenth centuries was that all studies of nature were regarded as strongly savoring of infidelity, and were therefore to be discountenanced. So it was that not until the revival of letters were museums known in the Christian era.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries every prince of Europe felt it incumbent upon him to be a patron of learning, and, with the object of advancing the knowledge of nature, formed a cabinet in which were mingled in the most absurd manner Chinese mermaids, pebbles from the Holy Land, birds from the Orient, and coins from ancient Rome. Every prince also deemed it his duty to employ some scrivener to write, in that quality of Latin which has justly been styled "piggish," descriptions of the various curiosities thus brought together; and these lucubrations, embracing fact and fiction curiously mingled, were published with all sincerity in ponderous tomes illustrated with rude figures which, by a severe strain of the imagination,