Serpentum et Draconum Historiae

offices of uncommon love and kindness toward himself, you dedicated to your uncle, Cardinal ALESSANDRO, that phoenix of the purple-clad, and he received them with a most liberal hand—those books of Ornithology. Soon after the death of Aldrovandi, my father, Marcus Antonius, through the illustrious jurist Francesco Angelelli, a most devoted worshipper of your renowned name, obtained the right to publish another work by the same author, On Digitated Quadrupeds, under your most auspicious name. By a more expansive proof of your love for my father, you have encouraged the son (most humane patron) to renew, with this pledge, the claims of our mutual service, by which foreigners and posterity alike will acknowledge you to be the best Maecenas for us, shining upon the geniuses of our age like a salutary star. Indeed, we confess (most beneficent Prince) and openly declare that, from the pouring showers of your liberality, which you shed into the bosoms of the needy and the deserving, we have verified in you that true account which the ancients falsely told of Luerius, leader of the Celts: namely, that gold and blessings are produced by the tracks of your chariot for mortals. While we were meditating on these things with a more attentive mind, we could think of no one among the most excellent heroes of this age to whom we owed these commentaries on Serpents by Aldrovandi—a man of singular learning—more justly than to you, to whom the rationale of an ancient client-relationship, attested by the public monuments of our author, had already long since made them your own. Truly, bound to you by the tightest bond of service, we are unable to explain in words, much less in deeds, with what devotion and ardor we revere the genius of your divine virtue; in honor of