Miiseinn-Histoj^y and Miiscnins of History. 67 



chaiif^ed more than we suppose, Aristotle must have had a great museum 

 of natural history. 



When the Roman capital was removed to Byzantium, the arts and 

 letters of Etirope began to decliiie. The Church was unpropitious, and 

 the invasions of the northern barbarians destroyed everything. In 476, 

 with the close of the Western Empire, began a period of intellectual 

 torpidity which was to last for a thousand j^ears. 



It was in Bagdad and Cordova that science and letters were next to be 

 revived, and Africa was to surpass Europe in the extent of its libraries. 

 In the Periplus, or Voyage of Hanno, occurs the following passage 

 in regard to specimens of Gorillas, or " Gorgones : " 



Pursuing them, we were not able to take the men (males); they all escaped, being 

 able to climb the precipices, and defended themselves with pieces of rock. But three 

 women (females), who bit and scratched those who led them, were not willing to 

 follow. However, having killed them, we flayed them, and conveyed the skins to 

 Carthage; for we did not sail any further, as provisions began to fail.' 



With the Renaissance came a period of new life for collectors. The 

 churches of southern Europe became art galleries, and monarchs and 

 noblemen and ecclesiastical dignitaries collected books, manuscripts, 

 sculptures, pottery, and gems, forming the beginning of collections 

 which have since grown into public museums. Some of these collec- 

 tions doubtless had their first beginnings in the midst of the dark ages, 

 within the walls of feudal castles, or the larger monasteries, but their 

 number was small, and the^^ must have consisted chiefly of those objects 

 so nearly, akin to literature as especially to command the attention of 

 bookish men. 



As soon as it became the fashion for the powerful and the wealth}^ to 

 possess collections, the scope of their collections began to extend, and 

 objects w^ere gathered on account of their rarity or grotesqueness, as well 

 as for their beauty or instructiveness. Flourens, in his Eife and Works 

 of Blumenbach, remarks: "The old Germany, with its old chateaux, 

 seemed to pay no homage to science; still the lords of these ancient and 

 noble mansions had long since made it a business, and almost a point of 

 honor, to form with care what were called cabinets of curiosities. ' ' 



To the apothecar)^ of old, with his shop crowded with the curious 

 substances used in the medical practice of his day, the musetim owes 

 some of its elements, just as the modern botanic garden owes its earliest 

 history to the "physic garden," which in its time was an outgrowth 

 of the apothecary's garden of simples. The apothecary in Romeo and 



Juliet— 



In whose needy .shop a tortoise hung. 

 An alligator stuff 'd, and other skins 

 Of eel-shaped fishes, — 



was the precursor of the modern museum keeper. In the hostelries and 

 taverns, the gathering places of the people in the sixteenth and seven- 



' Owen, Transactions, Zoological Society of lyondon, V, p. 266, footnote. 



