The Mollusc Collection is one of the oldest in the Museum. It was created in the 19th century, most of the credit for the establishment and assembling of it going to the founder of the Museum Antun Drobac. President of the Chamber of Commerce and Trades in Dubrovnik, he had been approached by Dubrovnik people all around the world about the idea of founding a technical school in the city. A precondition for such a school was that it should have technical and natural history practical rooms richly furnished with collections. Thus Drobac started an initiative for collecting various kinds of cultural and historical, ethnographic and other valuable objects, above all “naturalia”, but because of the refusal of the government in Vienna to grant permission, the original idea of a technical school was modified, and the idea of creating a museum took its place. The basis of the Museum was to consist of his own collections, among which was the Collection of Molluscs. Also to be credited with the assembly of the collection was his contemporary, Fra Ivan Evanđelist Kuzmić, who had gone deeply into a study of the bivalves and snails of southern Dalmatia. The collection was supplemented by Baldo Kosić with examples of molluscs from the Dubrovnik area, on the whole sea snails, bivalves and cephalopods. The great Croatian natural historian Spiridon Brusina also enriched the collection with donations; during his many years of work, he discovered a hundred or so new species and subspecies of recent snails and bivalves.