276 EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE CONTEMPLATION OP 



name Gomara, Oviedo, Acosta and Hernandez. Columbus 

 brought home from his first voyage some natural produc- 

 tions, fruits and skins of animals. In a letter written 

 from Segovia (August 1494), Queen Isabella requests the 

 Admiral to continue his collections, and particularly desires 

 "all birds belonging to the shores and the woods of 

 countries having a different climate and seasons." Prom the 

 same west coast of Africa, from which, almost 2000 years 

 earlier, Hanno brought " tanned skins of wild women/' (the 

 skins of the great Gorilla ape), to be suspended in a temple, 

 Martin Behaim's friend Cadamosto, brought to the Infante 

 Henry the Navigator, black elephant's hair a palm an da half 

 long. Hernandez, the surgeon of Philip II., and sent by that 

 monarch to Mexico, to have all the most remarkable objects 

 of the vegetable and animal kingdoms in that country 

 represented by fine drawings, was able to augment his 

 collections by copies of several very carefully executed 

 pictures of specimens of natural history, which had been 

 painted by command of a king of Tezcuco, Nezahualcoyotl, 

 ( 428 ) half a century before the arrival of the Spaniards. 

 Hernandez also availed himself of a collection of medicinal 

 plants, which he found still growing in the ancient Mexican 

 garden of Huaxtepec. Owing to its proximity to a newly 

 established Spanish hospital, ( 429 ) this garden had not been 

 laid waste by the Conquistadores. Almost at the same time, 

 the fossil bones of Mastodons found on the plateaus of 

 Mexico, New Granada, and Peru, which afterwards became 

 of so much importance in reference to the theory of the 

 successive elevation of different chains of mountains, were 

 collected and described. The names of Giants' bones, 

 and Giants' fields (Campos de Gigantes), shew how 



