256 Dr. G. Brown Goode's Paper. [500 
“ Pursuing them, we were not able to take the men (males) ; they all escaped, 
being able to climb the precipices, and defended themselves with pieces of rock. 
But three women (females), who bit and scratched those who led them, were not 
willing to follow. However, having killed them, we flayed them, and conveyed the 
skins to Carthage ; for we did not sail any further, as provisions began to fail.” ^ 
With the Renaissance came a period of new life for col- 
lectors. The churches of southern Europe became art 
galleries, and monarchs and noblemen and ecclesiastical 
dignitaries collected books, manuscripts, sculptures, pot- 
tery, and gems, forming the beginning of collections which 
have since grown into public museums. Some of these 
collections doubtless had their first beginnings in the midst 
of the dark ages, within the walls of feudal castles, or the 
larger monasteries, but their number was small, and they 
must have consisted chiefly of those objects so nearly akin 
to literature as especially to command the attention of 
bookish men. 
As soon as it became the fashion for the powerful and the 
wealthy to possess collections, the scope of their collec- 
tions began to extend, and objects were gathered on ac- 
count of their rarity or grotesqueness, as well as for their 
beauty or instructiveness. Flourens, in his “ Life and 
Works of Blumenbach,” remarks: “ The old Germany, with 
its old chateaux, seemed to pay no homage to science ; still 
the lords of these ancient and noble mansions had long since 
made it a business, and almost a point of honor, to form 
with care what were called Cabinets of Curiosities.” 
To the apothecary of old, with his shop crowded with 
the curious substances used in the medical practice of his 
day, the museum owes some of its elements, just as the 
modern botanic garden owes its earliest history to the 
Physic Garden,” which in its time was an outgrowth of 
the apothecary’s garden of simples. The Apothecary in 
“ Romeo and Juliet ” — 
“ In whose needy shop a tortoise hung, 
An alligator stuff’d, and other skins 
Of eel-shaped fishes,” — 
was the precursor of the modern museum-keeper. In the 
hostelries and taverns, the gathering-places of the people 
^ Owen, Trans. Zool. Soc., London, v., p. 266, foot-note. 
