In a short prefatory note to an unknown reader, Browne compares this “Musæum Clausum” with the Musæum Aldrovandi, the Musæum Calceolarianum; the Casa Abbellita at Loretto, and the repositories of the Emperor Rudolf at Prague and Vienna, all of them famed collections of his day. Among the rare books and documents in Browne's “Musæum” are King Solomon's treatise on the shadow cast by our thoughts, de Umbris Idæarum, previously reported to have been in the library of the Duke of Bavaria; a collection of Hebrew epistles, which passed between the two most learned women of the seventeenth century, Molinea of Sedan and Maria Schurman of Utrecht; and “a Sub Marine Herbal” describing in exhaustive detail all that grows on the mountain ranges and in the valleys under the sea, the many kinds of algae, corals and waterferns never seen by man, sargassum borne along by tropical currents, as well as whole islands of plants drifting from continent to continent in the path of the trade winds.
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