68 NATURAL HISTORY. 



much abroad, and ultimately settled in London. He 

 founded a well-known botanic garden at Lambeth, and 

 obtained much notoriety through his museum, which was 

 known as ' Tradescant's Ark.' He died somewhere about 

 1652, and left his collections to his friend Elias Ashmole, 

 a well-known antiquary of his day. By Ashmole 

 the entire collection was ultimately presented to the 

 university of Oxford, where it became the nucleus 

 of the famous 'Ashmolean Museum.' Among the 

 great rarities in Tradescant's museum was a stuffed 

 specimen of the dodo, the great extinct pigeon of the 

 Mauritius, of which the bill and foot are still preserved at 

 Oxford. 



Sir Hans Sloane's collections had, as their nucleus and 

 starting-point, the numerous zoological and botanical 

 specimens which he had gathered together during his stay 

 in the West Indies. To these he kept on constantly 

 adding during the whole of his long life. He received by 

 bequest one very extensive collection, which had been 

 got together by Mr William Courten (known later as 

 William Charlton), and which was estimated to have a 

 value of about eight thousand pounds an enormous sum 

 of money in those 'days. He also bought for four thousand 

 pounds the collections of Mr James Petiver, who lived in 

 the later part of the seventeenth century. Petiver was a 

 member of the Apothecaries' Company, and a wealthy 

 man ; and having many acquaintances among the captains 

 and surgeons of ships, he was able to pick up many 

 rarities. He was, however, more than a mere collector, 

 and not only published several catalogues of portions of 

 his collections, but also contributed to the Philosophical 



