Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/849

Rh become a splendid city, with its fortifications replaced by spacious boulevards, adorned with gardens, handsome houses, and palaces. Science is destined to profit largely by these transformations. On one side of the Hôtel de Ville has been built the elegant Parliament-House, and on the other side, as a pendant to it, the Palace of the University. A little way from the Parliament-House, opposite the Imperial Palace, have recently been completed the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of Natural History. The University and the Natural History Museum are thus in the finest quarter of the city.

The University building is nearly finished. It is a pleasure to be a student in such a palace. Professor Suess, an eminent savant and a member of Parliament, directs the geological collections; and another professor, not less accomplished, Professor Neumayr, the paleontological cabinets. The Museum of Natural History belongs to the court (Hof Naturalien Museum). The emperor has just put at its head M. de Hauer, who was formerly director of the Geological Institute. M. Fuchs is charged especially with the department of paleontology. I was told that the fossils would be separated from living species, as they were in the old museum, and that they would occupy six halls. The Hall of Vertebrates is adorned with mural paintings representing the landscapes of the different geological epochs, with their most characteristic animals and plants. These pictures are separated from one another by statues which have paleontological attributes. One figure holds an icthyosaurus, another the head of a dinotherium, another a part of Cervus megaceros, another the head of a unitatherium, etc. I only saw a few of the fossils, for they were all disarranged; but, among those which M. Fuchs was able to show me, I remarked skeletons of Ursus spelæus, a skeleton of Megaceros, and one of the quaternary goat, five specimens of the mastodon and dinotherium, and a series of vertebrates from Maragha in Persia, of the same age as those of Pikermi and those from Baltavar in Hungary which have been described by M. Suess. Besides these collections, I visited by the courtesy of M. Stur, the new director, the Geologische Reichsanstalt, which the fossils being arranged according to both the geographical and the geological order, is perhaps the finest collection of stratigraphic paleontology in Europe. Particularly to be admired are the ammonites from the trias of the Austrian Alps, respecting which M. de Mojsisovics has lately made some interesting publications.

I have not been in Pesth lately, but two learned Hungarian professors, MM. de Hautken and Szabo, have assured me that, since I last visited that city, its collections of geology and paleontology have become very important.

In Prague, Professor Fritsch conducted me to the place where the foundations of a grand Bohemian Museum of Natural Sciences have recently been laid. While awaiting the erection of this establishment, a special provisory hall of paleontology has been built near the old