July 8, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



33 



kind. The gigantic forms of hitherto un- 

 known animals and plants filled their 

 imagination with the most exciting images. 

 Writers, whose dry scientific stjde is usually 

 devoid of all animation, became poetic when 

 they described the characteristics of animals, 

 as, for instance, elephants, or when they 

 spoke of the height of trees whose summits 

 connot be reached by the arrow in its flight 

 and whose leaves are larger than the shields 

 of the infantry ; of ' the bamboo, a light 

 feathery tree-like grass, ' ' each of whose 

 jointed parts (internodia) may serve for a 

 many-oared keel ; ' or of the Indian fig-tree 

 that takes root by its branches and whose 

 stem has a diameter of twenty-eight feet, 

 and which, as Onesicritus remarked, with 

 much truth to nature, forms ' a leafy 

 canopy similar to a tent, supported by 

 numerous pillars.' " 



Those splendid accessions to the knowl- 

 edge of Greek students, with their probable 

 accompaniments of collections, might natu- 

 rally have developed the museum idea in 

 Alexander's friend Aristotle, the immortal 

 type of the spirit of research. Professor 

 Flower has alluded to the probable begin- 

 nings of museum collections in the " preser- 

 vation of remarkable specimens, sometimes 

 associated with superstitious veneration, 

 sometimes with strange legendary stoi'ies, 

 in the buildings devoted to religious wor- 

 ship. The skin of the gorillas brought by 

 the navigator Hanno from the West Coast 

 of Africa, and hung up in the temple at 

 Carthage, affords a well-known instance." 



When learning revived ; when, to use the 

 exquisite language of Pater, " the desire for 

 a more liberal and comely way of conceiv- 

 ing life, make themselves felt, prompting 

 those who experience this desire to seek 

 first one and then another means of intel- 

 lectual or imaginative enjoyment, and di- 

 recting them not merely to the discovery of 

 old and forgotten sources of this enjoy- 

 ment, but to divine new sources of it, new 



experiences, new subjects of poetry, new 

 forms of art "—then sprang up, too, with the 

 new evidences of mental regeneration the 

 desire of keeping together beautiful and 

 curious things. 



IS'aturally, the first developments were in 

 the nature of collections of art, the bring- 

 ing together in groups sculpture and paint- 

 ings and antiquities. Since the revival of 

 learning began with the passionate devotion 

 to classical literature the rich and learned 

 turned with an appropriate ardor to all that 

 could be obtained in that buried field of 

 emotion, grace and eloquence. And since 

 the art of the pagan, as Taine urges, brought 

 the revivifying breath that made Christian 

 art beautiful and manifold, creative and 

 cosmopolitan, so the ancient things of 

 Greece and Rome were enviously gathered. 

 Books and libraries and statues in museums 

 were rapidly accumulated. It was a liberal 

 prince, a rich merchant, a trading monarch, 

 a distinguished physician, or the egotism as 

 well as the enlightenment of a noble, that 

 started the first growth of museums. 

 Stones, gems, shells, fish and animals 

 quickly assumed places in museum collec- 

 tions, and the long hidden instinct of natural 

 study hastened hither and thither on land 

 and sea the zealous and wondering collec- 

 tors. Once started, the flame of desire spread 

 quickly, and, everywhere fed by the oil of 

 rivalry, men and women in high or in influ- 

 ential stations collected and collected and 

 collected, turning their homes into store- 

 houses of curiosities and maddening arrays 

 of impossible associations. This very in- 

 congruity stimulated further efforts at an 

 extravagant amplitude of contents and only 

 as time passed on was a separation eflfected 

 by which the provinces of IJiatural History 

 and Art proper secured mutual independ- 

 ence. We can clearly realize the effectual 

 assertion of temperament in sucli collec- 

 tions ; how one man or woman with an in- 

 born and now indulged love of nature col- 



