church, which hurled an anathema against all further investigations. The noble and brave inhabitants of Spain, the valiant and intelligent people of Italy, the nervous and quick-minded French, the accurate and slow Germans, all were in the same way subdued, and prepared to recognize nothing but the ideas approved by the church. Curiously enough, there never existed a stricter censorship of published books, the censors being at first Catholic priests and afterwards principally Jesuits, and their opinions are printed on the first page of many old works on natural history. It should never be forgotten that while those countries which accepted the Reformation grew stronger and stronger, fostered intelligence, and furthered science, all others, even the noblest, degenerated, and never again reached their former prominence, though they struggled bravely and nobly. Everybody will remember poor Galilei, a giant sacrificed to the glory of the church. Every kind of free thought seemed then, as at the present time, most pernicious to this infallible institution.
It now became the fashion for princes to possess collections. They contained celebrated medicines paid for by their weight in gold. Bezoar, the horn of the unicorn, the Maledivian nut, the Alraun, were perhaps placed side by side with such rarities as the pistol with which Berthold Schwarz tested gunpowder when he had discovered it, with Chinese or Egyptian relics, and what would now be considered bric-à-brac of every kind. The German Emperor Rudolf II., otherwise known for his avaricious and indecent behavior, spent large sums of money for his collections, and paid a thousand gold florins, a very large sum for those times, to his artist Hoefnagel, for drawing the specimens contained in them. The magnificent miniatures on parchment, in four volumes, are still extant. The Princes of Gottorf brought together an admirable collection, called, after the fashion of those times, Kunstkammer (cabinet of art), the remnants of which are still prominent treasures of the collections of Copenhagen and St. Petersburg.
A competition now arose between travelers in search of interesting objects. I will mention only those of the Baron von Herberstein to Moscow, of the Ambassador Busbeq to Constantinople, who imported the first tulip, of Olearius to the East Indies, and of Kaempfer to Japan. Eventually nearly every prince felt obliged to have a well-arranged cabinet.
A prominent physician in Nurnberg, Besler, published a description of his collection, or rather figures of some objects, in 1642; the first edition of which is very rare, printed on blue-tinted
