10 BULLETIN : MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 



gardiiig the " subterranean fish " of Narbonne and the views of earlier 

 writers on the nature of fossils in general. 



About this time interest became awakened in the formation of natural 

 history collections, first in Italy, where zoological gardens had long since 

 been introduced, and afterwai'ds generally throughout Europe. One of 

 the earliest and at the same time most extensive, was the museum 

 founded at Verona in 1572 by Francesco Calceolari, which contained a 

 number of Bolca fishes, and was the fruitful source of several publica- 

 tions. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1607), a noted scientist and professor 

 at the University of Bologna, brought together a large private collection, 

 out of which grew eventually the Public Museum of Bologna, and de- 

 scriptions of his minerals and fossils were published some years after his 

 deatli.-^ In 1574 an elaborate description was prepared by Mercato, but 

 not published until nearly a century and a half later, of the Vatican 

 collection of minerals, fossils, and antiquities which had been brought 

 together under the auspices of Pope Sixtus V. The priestly author, 

 however, was content to believe tliat not only fossils, but even an- 

 cient pottery and inscriptions were mineral concretions which had 

 assumed their shapes through the influence of celestial bodies.^ Agassiz 

 contemptuously remarks of this work that it is a " compilation sans 

 valeur et sans goiit." The physician Olivi of Cremona, who described 

 in 1584 the fossils contained in the Calceolarian Museum,^ vvas likewise 

 prejudiced in regarding them as lusi naturae. Nevertheless his woi*k 

 was deemed worthy of being reprinted nine years later, and new illus- 

 trations of the same museum appeared in 1G22, at the hands of Ceruti 

 and Chiocco, as already noted. It is in this work that the opinions of 

 Fracastoro, announced more than a century earlier, are at last accorded 

 recognition. Among the curiosities of palaeontological literature be- 

 longing to this period should be mentioned Buonaraici's dissertation on 

 Gloss02>etrae* published in 1668. 



Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. The important contri- 

 butions to palaeontology made by Fabius Colonna, Nicolas Steno, and 

 Augustin Scilla during the seventeenth century are well known, hence we 



1 Anibrosini, Musaeum nietallicum. 1648. 



2 Mercato, M., Metallotheca [Vaticana], opus posthumum. Rome, 1717. 



^ Olivi, G. B., De recondites et praecipius collectaneis a Francesco Calceolario 

 Veronensis, in Museo adservatis. Verona, 1584; and A^enice, 1593. 



■* Biionamici, F., Siille p^lossopetre, gli ocelli di serpe ed altre pietre, etc. (Opusc. 

 Sicil. Vol. XIL), 1668. References to otiier essays of tins period on the same sub- 

 ject will be found in Palaeontographica, XLI. pp. 149-153, 1895. 



