244 History of Concltology. 



ferior to that of Aristotle's, and his arrangement of them the same ; 

 hence his advocacy of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, when 

 his contemporary Redi had demonstrated its absurdity ; hence his 

 exclusive attention to the form and colour of shells to his total over- 

 sight of conchology as a branch of general physiology ; hence also 

 his fondness in propounding, his copiousness in solving occult ques- 

 tions which, if resolved, were of no utility, but which were really 

 beyond the province of human inquiry ; hence the discussion where- 

 fore shellfish were defective in this and that organ, without the 

 slightest effort to ascertain whether that deficiency was a fact ; and 

 hence, in short, the reason that his volume contains not a single 

 fact additional to the stock of knowledge in his own province, for 

 we do not find that he has " treated of the formation of shells in a 

 manner more philosophical than could have been expected at such 

 a period," as Maton and Rackett have asserted. But we have no 

 wish to depreciate Bonanni, who, as we have already mentioned, 

 was a man of learning and repute, and it is not discreditable to an 

 author that he is affirmed not to have anticipated his age : we have 

 drawn his character as we think fairly, and it is a fair representa- 

 tion too, of the bulk of conchologists of his time, who obviously had 

 little other object in the study than to indulge their love of virtuoso- 

 ship. 



Philippo Bonanni and Dr Martin Lister were co-equals in the 

 date of the publication of their works,* but in character they were 

 men of remote eras. Lister was not less learned than the Jesuit, 

 but of that he made no parade, and if he had drunk of the logic of 

 the schoolmen, his tutored mind had seen its folly, for we never 

 find him indulging in disquisitions about things inscrutable or use- 

 less. Full of the medical knowledge of the day, Lister betook him- 

 self, following the bent of his genius, to a patient anatomy of the 

 animals which tenant and construct the shells that had won his ad- 

 miration, and, allowing for the state of anatomy then, we do not 

 hesitate to say that his Exercitationes deserve to rank beside those 

 of Poli and Cuvier. They are replete with accurate descriptions, 

 not unmixed it is true with error, and some things he had overlook- 

 ed and mistaken, but to mark these as blots on his diligence or re- 

 putation were uncandid and unfair to him who leaves the olden 

 ways and deviates into a new country, in which he has to open up 

 the roads. In every page Lister proves himself a laborious and ob- 

 servant anatomist and naturalist ; while his disquisitions and di- 

 gressions relative to the leaning of his discoveries on the physiolo- 



* Lister's works were published between the years 1669 and 1697. 



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