BONANXI. 499 



its native sea ; inquires into the causes of shells being more 

 abundant in the sea than on the land, and especially in the 

 Indian Ocean, where they are also more beautifully pictured ; 

 why they are principally coloured on the exterior ; where- 

 fore they grow hard, seeing they are formed out of soft 

 water ; why they are twisted into many spires ; why their 

 snails have scarcely any diversity of members ; why they are 

 destitute of teeth, a heart, and bones ; why nature denies 

 them bile, and a liver, and a spleen ; why they grow lean on 

 the wane of the moon ; why they are slow and stoltish ; why 

 the juice of the Pholas is luminous at night ; why among 

 their various colours the cerulean is not to be found ; and 

 other such problems hitherto unargued or propounded, — not 

 omitting to inquire learnedly whether the Remora, that 

 stayed the ship sent from Periander on a cruel voyage to the 

 Cape of Gnidos, was actually the shell called in consequence 

 the Venus-shell, and " in regard whereof, the inhabitants of 

 Gnidos doe honour and consecrate the said Porcellane within 

 their temple of Venus." The fourth and last part is occu- 

 pied with the plates and figures described in the second, dis- 

 tributed into three classes, viz., the univalves not turbinate, 

 the bivalves, and the turbinate univalves. 



This slight outline of Bonanni's book is, perhaps, suffi- 

 cient to enable you to appreciate its value, and the character 

 of the writer. He was a Jesuit, with attainments and natural 

 talents which, though respectable, certainly do not raise him 

 above the level of his age, — perhaps he was under it, — better 

 acquainted with the writings of his predecessors than of his 

 contemporaries, — with the tastes of a virtuoso rather than of 

 the man of science, skilful in all the vain logomachies of the 

 schoolmen, and willing to give a ready assent to every thing 

 which had ancient authority in its favour, but jealous and 

 distrustful of all that was novel, and of every discovery that 

 would carry knowledge forward.* Hence we find his ana- 

 tomy of shell-fish inferior to that of Aristotle's, and his 

 arrangement of them nearly the same ; hence his advocacy 

 of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, when his contem- 

 porary Redi had demonstrated its absurdity; hence his ex- 

 clusive attention to the form and colour of shells to his total 

 oversight of conchology as a branch of general physiology ; 

 hence also his fondness in propounding, his copiousness in 

 solving occult questions which, if resolved, were of no utility, 



* " Trop .attache mix sentimcns d'Aristote ct des anciens, il n'a jamais 

 voulu so rendre aux d^couvcrtcs ct aux experiences des modemes, particu 

 lierement surles Coquillages fossiles qu'il croit etre des jeux <le la Nature." 

 — D'Argenvjlle, Conchyliologie, p. 114. 



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