CONCHOLOGY. 



history. No classic reader of the Halieutics of Oppian will doubt 

 the general acquaintance of the ancients with those beings in their 

 native element, nor will any one imagine, who is conversant witU 

 the lives of the philosophers of the infant ages of the world, that the 

 study of Conchology, even as a science, was unknown. So many 

 writings of the ancients, even of the classic ages of Greece and Rome, 

 have disappeared, that it may be now impossible to form any very 

 accurate conclusions, at the same time that enough remains to jus- 

 tify our persuasion that it was far from inconsiderable. Among 

 others, the works of Aristotle, the preceptor of the Macedonian 

 conqueror Alexander, have survived the ravages of time, and very 

 happily, for the history of human knowledge unfolds to us the views 

 which the ancients had then taken of natural science, and among 

 the rest of the science of Conchology; and there is, moreover, 

 every reason to believe that in the classification of the testaceous 

 tribes, or shells, which the writings of this philosopher present us, 

 we, in reality, possess the arrangement of the shells composing the 

 Conchological collection of that most potent monarch, the conqueror 

 of the world : — the classical distribution of the shells of the great 

 Alexander, as they were disposed by the most celebrated naturalist 

 of his age, and at a period more remote than three centuries before 

 the commencement of the Christian aera. 



The Science of Conchology, like that of all other branches of 

 nature, has undergone its mutations at various periods. Generally, 

 it has held a rank of some eminence, a circumstance attributable 

 no doubt to the peculiar beauty of this interesting tribe. In speak- 

 ing of the latter times, the period of the last and preceding centuries, 

 it>vouJd be difficult to determine in which country of civilized Europe 



