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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1076 



case, since there are preserved to us from 

 their time many objects of their art which 

 were originally objects of nature. While 

 material which they prized now occupies 

 an honored place in our museums and their 

 civilization was instrumental in preserving 

 it to us, there is no evidence, so far as I 

 know, that they undertook the collection 

 and preservation of natural objects for 

 their own sake. 



The Greeks gave us the word museum, 

 but that they ever established a museum in 

 the modern sense seems very unlikely. 

 Whatever their practise may have been re- 

 garding the preservation and exhibition of 

 works of art, it seems quite certain that 

 they carried on little, if any, effort of this 

 kind with regard to nature. Alexander the 

 Great, about 325 B.C., is said to have gath- 

 ered together many animals and plants in 

 order that they might be studied by Aris- 

 totle, "the father of natural history," but 

 so far as we know no effort was made to 

 preserve these specimens to later times. 

 The first record of placing natural history 

 specimens on exhibition is said to be that 

 made when Hanno, a Carthaginian, some- 

 what before Alexander's time, procured 

 skins of gorillas in Africa and put them in 

 the temple of Astarte. We also know that 

 the monstrous horns of wild bulls which had 

 occasioned great devastation in Macedonia 

 were hung in the temple of Hercules by 

 order of King Philip. 



The Romans seem, like the Greeks, not to 

 have taken much interest in the preserva- 

 tion of natural objects, at least as far as any 

 record has reached the present time. We 

 know that emperors and other individuals 

 possessed collections of statues and other 

 works of art, and among these we find oc- 

 casional mention of the preservation of so- 

 called "natural curiosities," such as bones 

 of giants or peculiar human skeletons, but 

 that any broad interest in nature existed 



which led to efforts to preserve and study 

 its forms we have no record. Stray sources 

 of information tell us of a crocodile, found 

 in attempting to discover the sources of the 

 Nile, being preserved in the temple of Isis 

 at Cesarea, also that a large piece of the 

 root of the cinnamon tree was kept in a 

 golden vessel in one of the temples at Rome. 

 Pliny relates that the bones of a sea mon- 

 ster, probably a whale, "to which Andro- 

 meda was exposed," were preserved at 

 Joppa and afterwards brought to Rome. 

 Suetonious says that the Emperor Augustus 

 had a collection of natural curiosities in his 

 palace. 



One reason suggested by Beckmann for 

 the rarity of collections of natural objects 

 among ancient peoples was the lack of 

 knowledge of satisfactory means of pre- 

 serving such as were perishable. The pre- 

 servative virtues of what was then called 

 "spirit of wine," but which we now know 

 as alcohol, seem to have been but little 

 known, and only immersion in salt brine or 

 a covering with wax or honey served at 

 that time for the preservation of perishable 

 materials. 



The great institute of Alexandria in 

 Egypt, founded in the third century B.C., 

 is generally spoken of as being the first 

 natural-history museum of antiquity, but 

 while this had botanical and zoological 

 gardens, there is little reason to suppose 

 that it was a museum of nature in the mod- 

 em sense. The name museum in that insti- 

 tution was applied to a portion set apart for 

 the study of sciences, and indicated rather a 

 place of study than one for exhibition of 

 objects. 



From the fourth to the seventeenth cen- 

 tury A.D., according to Goode, the term mu- 

 seum dropped out of use and the idea for 

 which it stood must also have been dor- 

 mant, yet even in those times many monas- 

 teries had collections of curiosities. In the 



