in the museum in Koenigsberg, Prussia, and belongs to a whale. Even now this custom is not entirely obsolete.
It seems certain that prominent naturalists, such as Aristotle and Apuleius, must have had collections, though there is no direct testimony to that effect given in any of their works still extant. The order of Alexander the Great for hunters, trappers, and fishermen to bring all kinds of natural objects to Aristotle, is well known; Theophrast and Apuleius are also known to have studied and dissected many different kinds of animals, chiefly fishes. Apuleius is the first naturalist known to have found it profitable and necessary to make voyages for the purpose of studying foreign animals, and collecting palæontological objects in the Getulic Alps, but unfortunately all his works on zoölogy are lost. The Emperor Augustus is considered the first prince possessing collections of a scientific nature.
I presume that the certain knowledge of the collections of the great naturalists above quoted was lost, as the collections themselves were quickly destroyed, for lack of means for sufficient preservation. The truth of this explanation is made more apparent since the successive discovery of more convenient and easier means of preservation of objects has made these collections more lasting and permanent through later generations. In a really interesting and obvious way, every new discovery, every improvement in the manner of preservation, has given a newer and stronger impulse to the enlargement of the collections, to the perfection of science.
Some methods of preserving objects were of course known to the ancients, but these methods were the same as those used for the preservation of food or of corpses, and generally not at all adapted or sufficient to preserve objects in a manner to make them fit for scientific purposes. The principal of these methods consisted in the exclusion or the prevention of the obnoxious action of oxygen. So the objects were preserved or dried, pickled with salt or spices, or entirely covered with salt water, honey, or wax.
The sow which was said to have borne thirty young pigs to Æneas was pickled by the priests, and was still to be seen at Lavinium in Varro’s time, some ten centuries later. Large African animals pickled with salt, two hippocentauri and a large monkey, sent to Rome, were seen many years later by Pliny. Other large animals preserved in the same way were sent to the emperors in Constantinople, and even much later the hippopotamus described by Cohunna arrived, pickled with salt.
