Page:The American naturalist. (IA mobot31753002156567).pdf/94

88 paper. The collection contains dried plants, Indian nuts arranged on a string (a horrid poison), a branch of a plum-tree with one hundred and twenty plums, weighing thirteen and one quarter pounds, horns of the unicorn, monstrous horns of other animals, a stuffed lynx, whose open mouth and red tongue made him look very ferocious, the cranium of a wolf, the bone of his tongue and wind-pipe, a rodent animal from Moscow, some birds, the cranium of a swan, a nautilus with carved shell, monstrous heads formed by shells, minerals, money, medals, crystals, the sword of Ziska, a Turkish pipe, vases of terra sigillata, fire-proof cloth of asbestos, jewels, guns, old stone hatchets, corals, Indian ink, fucus growing on a stone, and petrefactions.

I have enumerated purposely the contents of one collection of this time, and have chosen this particularly because it seemed to be the most interesting, as the description of it was reprinted four times in the years immediately following. A rich and partially classified catalogue of John Tradescant’s collections was published in England by his son; but one will not be surprised to find such a heading: “Some kinds of birds and their eggs,” and among them “Easter-eggs of the Patriarch of Jerusalem,” and “the claw of the roc bird, which, as authors report, is able to truss an elephant.”

As numerous other collections of this period were arranged in a similar manner, I prefer to mention only one more, that of the Jesuits in the Collegium Romanum at Rome, because the catalogue printed in 1678 shows the interior rooms in which the collection was arranged. As Italy was at this time still the leading country of the world in fashion and culture, and the order of the Jesuits influential and powerful, the arrangement of their collection may be considered as a fair example for others in that century, which certainly more or less imitated it, but never surpassed it. We find large, vaulted galleries, connected with vaulted rooms, the floor covered with inlaid marbles, the ceiling with allegorical pictures. The arrangement of the exhibited objects shows a kind of refined taste, and is agreeable to the eye; the taller and more prominent objects being arranged by themselves in the middle, as, for instance, a number of Egyptian obelisks, on the top of each of which were placed emblems of Christianity. Busts and other objects were placed on columns along the wall, the spaces between them being provided with shelves bearing smaller objects. Pictures and astronomical maps fill the upper part of the wall, and heavier things, such as a crocodile, are suspended from the ceil-