ABSTRACT
For the new Museum was of twofold inspiration, historical and scientific. It brought together; for preservation in the first place, and as it proved later for vast development, the accumulated results, so far as they had gone, on the one hand of the studies in national records of the Elizabethan and Jacobean antiquaries, and on other of the researches into nature and natural law of the enquiring minds of the preceding hundred years. In Italy and the neighbouring countries the chief quarry of the Renaissance collectors was the classical literature of Greece and Rome, of which manuscripts were being discovered in monasteries and elsewhere, and which more and more men were able and eager to read. The intellectual current which, joining with that of historical enquiry, went to create the Museum and its library, was that of scientific discovery. The sixteenth and still more the seventeenth century had seen a wonderful series of brilliant advances in the knowledge of nature.
