BONANNI. 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" aux sentimens d'Aristote et des anciens, il n'a jamais 

 voulu se rendre aux decouvertes et aux experiences des modernes, particu- 

 lierement sur les Coquillages fossiles qu'il croit etre des jeux de la Nature." 

 D'ARGENVILLE, Conchy iiologie, p. 114. 



K K 2 



