Natural philosophers were fascinated by all sorts of strange occurrences, and they avidly collected those exotic naturalia and artificialia that had a whiff of the marvelous. Even Francis Bacon, who was a proponent of empirical thought and the thinker credited with devising the model for the first scientific society in England, believed that special attention should be paid to all sorts of marvels. Bacon claimed in his The Advancement of Learning (1605) that natural history could be divided into three parts: "nature in course," "nature erring or varying," and "nature altered, or wrought."¹ The first category included all naturally occurring flora and fauna; the second included marvels, monsters, and other apparently unnatural creatures; and the third represented works of art made by human beings. Elsewhere he referred to these categories as the "History of Creatures, History of Marvailes, and History of Arts' (3:330). Bacon believed that sufficient progress was being made in the first area, but that the others were deficient. He lamented that there was no 'substantial and severe Collection of the Heteroclites, or irregulars of Nature" and he said this should be corrected by the collection and study of marvels (3:331). He offered a nice definition of the wondrous when he claimed that the marvels of interest to him "have a digression and deflection from the ordinary course of generations, productions, and motions' (3:330).