10 BULLETIN : MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 



garding the " subterranean fish " of Xarbonne and the views of earlier 

 writers on the nature of fossils in general. 



About this time interest became awakened in the formation of natural 

 history collections, first in Italy, where zoological gardens had long since 

 been introduced, and afterwards generally tliroughout Europe. One of 

 the earliest and at the same time most extensive, was the musenm 

 founded at Yerona in 1572 by Francesco Calceolari, which contained a 

 number of Bolca fishes, and was tlie fruitful source of several publica- 

 tions. Ulisse Aldrovaudi (1522-1607), a noted scientist and professor 

 at the University of Bologna, brought together a large private collection, 

 out of which grew eventually the Public Museum of Bologna, and de- 

 scriptions of his minerals and fossils were published some years after his 

 death. -^ In 1574 an elaborate description was prepared by Mercato, but 

 not publi.shed until nearly a century and a half later, of the Vatican 

 collection of minerals, fossils, and antiquities which had been brought 

 together under the auspices of Pope Sixtus V. The priestly author, 

 however, was content to believe that not only fossils, but even an- 

 cient pottery and inscriptions were mineral concretions which had 

 assumed their shapes through the influence of celestial bodies.^ Agassiz 

 contemptuously remarks of this work that it is a " compilation sans 

 valeur et sans gout." The physician Olivi of Cremona, who described 

 in 1584 the fossils contained in the Calceolariau Museum,^ was likewise 

 prejudiced in regarding them as lusi naturae. Xevertheless his work 

 was deemed worthy of being reprinted nine years later, and new illus- 

 trations of the same museum appeared in 1622, at the hands of Ceruti 

 and Chiocco, as already noted. It is in this work that the opinions of 

 Fracastoro, announced more than a centur}' earlier, are at last accorded 

 recognition. Among the curiosities of palaeontological literature be- 

 longing to this period should be mentioned Buonamici's dissertation on 

 Glosscrpetrae* published in 1668. 



Sevexteenth and Eighteexth Centuries. The important contri- 

 butions to palaeontology made by Fabius Colonna, Nicolas Steno, and 

 Augustin Scilla during the seventeenth century are well known, hence we 



1 Ambrosini, Musaenm nu'tallicum. 1648. 



2 Mercato, y\., Metallotheca [Vaticana], opus posthumum. Rome, 1717. 



3 Olivi. G. B., De recondites et praecipius coUectaneis a Francesco Calceolario 

 Veronensis. in Museo aclservatis. Verona, 1584: and Venice, 1503. 



* Bnonamiei, F., Siille ?lopsopetre, gli occhi di serpe ed altre pietre. etc. (Opusc. 

 SiciL Vol. XII.), 1668. References to other essays of tliis period on the same sub- 

 ject will be found in Palaeontographica, XLI. pp. 149-153, 1895. 



