Ferrante Imperato

The collection, which the published catalogue made as famous in the seventeenth century as that of that other famous apothecary and virtuoso, Francesco Calceolari of Verona,[4] ranged widely; it embraced a herbarium, shells, birds, sea creatures, in addition to the fossils, clays, minerals and metallic ores, marble and gem species.

It was maintained by his son Francesco, who assisted him in writing up his observations, and who may be seen in the engraving pointing out details of the specimens to two visitors as Ferrante looks on.

Cesalpino, a celebrated botanist, conceived that fossil shells had been left on the land by the retiring sea, and had concreted into stone during the consolidation the soil; and in the following year (1597), Simeone Majoli went still farther, and, coinciding for the most part with the views of Cesalpino, suggested that the shells and submarine matter of the Veronese, and other districts, might have been cast up, upon the land, by volcanic explosions, like those which gave rise, in 1588, to Monte Nuovo, near Puzzuoli.

This hint was the first imperfect attempt to connect the position fossil shells with the agency of volcanoes, a system more fully developed by Hooke, Lazzaro Moro, Hutton, and other writers.

Two years afterwards, Imperati advocated the animal origin of fossilized shells, yet admitted that stones could vegetate by force of "an internal principle;" and, as evidence of this, he referred to the teeth of fish, and spines of echini found petrified.