242 History of Conchology . 



considerably extended taste for the contemplation of Shells, which 

 was kept alive and diffused by the activity of a daily enlarging com- 

 merce furnishing, to collectors and amateurs, numerous novelties of 

 uncommon forms and beauty to gratify, and at the same time to sti- 

 mulate their curiosity. Hence also the origin of museums, of which 

 Aldrovandus is usually said to have set the example ; and of these 

 Shells made a large and favourite part from their beauty and variety, 

 and from the ease with which they were procured and preserved. 

 These museums soon became rather numerous in Italy and Germany, 

 and although they were undoubtedly formed more for the gratifica- 

 tion of the taste of their owners, than with any views towards 

 science, and hence arranged in fantastic and picturesque designs, still 

 it is from their institution that we date the origin of Conchology 

 as a separate branch of natural history. The catalogues published 

 of a few of the most considerable of these museums are among the 

 works generally enumerated as worthy of quotation in the history of 

 Conchology, and it was the love of making collections of shells se- 

 parately, that evidently gave origin to the works of Bonanni and 

 Lister, the first which treated exclusively of these natural objects. 



Bonanni's work was published in the year 1681, and from its 

 title — " Recreatio Mentis et Oculi in observatione Animalium tes- 

 taceorum" — was probably intended to be a book of luxury, exhibit- 

 ing in its plates whatever amongst shells might please the eye or 

 refocate the unoccupied mind. It is properly speaking, however, 

 an introduction to Conchology, and in this view of it, the volume 

 becomes interesting, since it affords the means by which the extent 

 of the knowledge of Conchology at that period may be estimated. 

 Of the writings of his immediate predecessors he speaks very 

 slightingly : they remind him, he says, by their boastings when these 

 are compared with their deeds, of those birds which floating aloft 

 in the heavens draw notice by the amplitude of their spread of 

 wing and the fulness of their plumage, but captured and plucked, 

 the exility of their corpse proves to the sportsman how much he 

 had been deceived ! The treatise is divided into four parts : in the 

 first, he proves, to his own satisfaction, that the study of shells is 

 not a puerile but a wise and profitable occupation; investigates the 

 mode of generation both of living and fossilized species ; declares the 

 fit materials from which they are formed, and takes occasion to talk 

 learnedly of water, earths, nitre and petrifying humours ; he de- 

 scants on their colours, forms, and properties by which the Creator 

 renders them visible to the privileged minds of philosophers ; and 

 lastly, enumerates their other uses to man, and what relates to them 



