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The Ashmolean As a Museum of Natural History, 1683-1860

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The Ashmolean As a Museum of Natural History, 1683-1860 The Ashmolean as a museum of natural history, 1683-1860 Arthur MacGregor For a period of almost two centurles the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford functioned as an integrated scientific institution, combining a conventional museum display with a chemlcal laboratory and a school Downloaded from of natural history. The history of the collection of naturalla is examined here In terms of three principal phases: dunng the earliest of these the character of the displays as revealed by contemporary catalogues was largely conditioned by the collection's genesis in a seventeenthentury cabinet of curiosities; In the second phase, centred early In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Impact of Linnaeus began to make Itself kit; in the third phase, occupying the second quarter of the nineteenth http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ century, the entire collectlon was redisplayed as an exposition of natural theology. Finally, by 1860 the natural specimens were transferred from the Ashmolean, leaving a much reduced collectlon of man- made objects from which the Museum in rts current form was later relaunched. EVERYONEwho knows the presentday Ashmolean a repository of man-made curiosities in the mid Museum, with its rich displays of art and archae- nineteenth century; following the removal in 18h ology, knows too that the ongins of the Museum's of the Ashmolean's coin collections to the Mleian at Universidade de S�o Paulo on March 24, 2016 collections lay in the cabinet of curiosities amassed Library and of the ethnographic specimens in 1886 by the Tradescants, father and son, during the earlier to the newly founded Pitt Rivers Museum, it was part of the seventeenth century and donated to the from this much redud rump that the reconstruc- University of Oxford by Etias Ashmole m 1683. tion of the Ashmolean in its presentday form was While there has long been a generalized appreciation launched. of the multi-faceted character of the early displays in the Ashmolean and although the continuing survival of the early catalogues has been a matter of record, it The prehistory of the Ashmolean's natural has only been with the publication of those invent- history collections ories in recent months, including translations of their It was of course as practical plantsmen that John Latin texts, that they have become accessible for Tradescant the elder (died 1638) and his son of the wide study.' From the details contained in the early same name (1608-62) earned their livlngs and their catalogues and from a number of surviving donors' considerable reputations. Numerous inductions of lists and other manuscript sources, together with the exotic species are credited to them by authors such as Museum's first p~tedcatalogue of 18~6,' we can Thomas Johnson and John Parkinson,' and it is clear now flesh out something of the development of the that the garden they established at Lambeth from the collections up to the point where nineteenthxentury Late 1620s functioned as a collection of Living rarities university-wide rationalization and reform led to the to complement the curiosities of art and nature extinction of the Ashmolean as predominantly a exhibited in their museum, aptly titled The Ark. museum of natural history and to the transfer of Little evidence survives to suggest that the Trades- those elements of its collections in the 1850s to cants were very systematic in acquiring natural speci- Oxford's newly founded Natural Science Museum. mens for their museum: in a plea for new materials What follows ~san attempt to reconstruct the now- circulated in 1625 the father reveals a preoccupation vanished character of the Ashmolean from its incep only with impressive size and with curiosity, as, for tion as a proto-scientific institution to its reduction to example, a 'Seacowes head the Bigest that Canbe ARTHUR MACGREGOR Gotten . the Greatest sorts of Shell fishes . 'wherof some are called Mollta, some Crustacea, Great flying fishes & Sucking fishes withe what els others Testacea\ acknowledged as including 'both strangle]'.4 umvalvta and hvalvta' The'Severall sorts of Insects, None the less, by virtue of the ever-increasing terrestrial' that conclude the zoological section are range, the wide geographical scope and the rarity of similarly divided up according to class - 'anelytra, many of the exhibits, the Tradescant collection came coleoptera, aptera, apoda'. to be acknowledged as an important scientific re- The contents of several pages of entries headed source, so that John Ray, for example, in his revision Fosstlta are again very mixed, as acknowledged by sub- of Francis Willughby's Ornithology (1678), made use headings for 'Earths, Coralls, Salts, Bitumens, Petri- of the specimens there to verify certain features of fied things, choicer Stones, Gemmes'. Rather more the dodo and other exotic birds which were then to native sources are acknowledged here, including Downloaded from 5 be found nowhere else in England. Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Cambridgeshire and Kent In the catalogue of the collection, published with Some eight pages of 'Outlandish Fruits from both Ashmole's sponsorship in 1656 and compiled in part the Indies' conclude the account of the naturalia, by Ashmole and Dr Thomas Wharton in association together with 'Seeds, Gummes, Roots, Woods, and with the younger Tradescant, the importance of the divers Ingredients Medicinall, and for the Art of http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ natural history element is immediately apparent.6 Dying'; the latter are arranged by colour and include None the less, the nature of some of the entries both organic and inorganic materials. makes quantification somewhat speculative. Amongst Scattered elsewhere are a few miscellaneous items the birds, for example, are some thirty entries for such as the 'Indian morrice bells' recorded there by 'Whole Birds', but they include descriptions such as Johnson, made, we are told, in the Cannibal Islands 'Birds of Paradise . whereof divers sorts, some of the West Indies from the dried and hollowed-out 7 with, some without leggs', and 'Many rare and cases of fruits into which pebbles had been inserted beautifull Indian birds, not found described in to make them rattle.9 Whole plant specimens appear at Universidade de S�o Paulo on March 24, 2016 authors'. A sub-section for eggs includes 'Divers to have been rare in the museum itself: if there were sorts of Egges from Turkie' one given for a Dragons herbaria in the collection we cannot detect them.10 egge', and 'Easter Egges of the Patriarchs of Jerusa- lem'. Other sub-sections list 'Feathers' (including 'Two feathers from the Phoenix tayle'); 'Claws', in The founding of the Ashmolean which category the most exotic of the twenty-five In the era when Elias Ashmole inherited the Tra- specimens must be that of 'the bird Rock; who as descant collection and formally proposed its donation Authors report, is able to trusse an Elephant'; and to Oxford, the University was in propitiously recep- 'Beaks, or Heads' of various specimens, amongst tive mood. Ancient academic mistrust of empirical which are six referenced to Markgraf's Htstona studies had begun to subside during the second half Naturahs Brasduu (1648). of the seventeenth century, and the study of 'philo- Brazilian specimens are again prominent among sophical history' formally entered the curriculum. As the four-footed beasts, with others from Greenland, part of his 'Propositions' submitted to the University Cape Verde, India and Arabia; several undoubted with a view to founding the Museum, Ashmole African specimens are also present. A number of nominated Dr Robert Plot to be the Reader in this heads, skins and other body parts are listed in subject and held out the prospect that he would in addition to (presumably) whole specimens, as well time endow the chair; although the endowment was as 'Divers Horns answering to those, by Authors never forthcoming, Plot was appointed the first attributed to the Ibex, Gazella, Hippelaphus, Trage- keeper of the Ashmolean in a move that underlined laphus, Cervus palmatum, Camelopardis, &c.'8 the integral role within the University curriculum Two pages of 'Fishes and their parts' include that the Museum was expected to play. fragments of sea-horses, dolphins, whales, narwhal It was as a resource for exploitation in researches (Unuomu martnum) and walrus, as well as true fishes of this kind that the Tradescant collection recom- of the more sought-after varieties such as remora and mended itself to Ashmole and it was its usefulness in sun-fish. Five pages of 'Shell-creatures' follow, this respect that he stressed in the formal document 126 Downloaded from http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidade de S�o Paulo on March 24, 2016 Downloaded from http://jhc.oxfordjournals.org/ at Universidade de S�o Paulo on March 24, 2016 THE ASHMOLEAN AS A MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY, 1683-1860 cabinets of the day. The other statute in question owed everything to the established conventions of would have had a particular relevance to the stuffed the Renaissance Kunstkammer collection and to the specimens: classical sources that in turn provided the conven- That as any particular growes old & perishing, the Keeper tional wisdom concerning their supposed properties. may remove it into one of the Qosets, or other repository; In this category may be counted a number of & some other to be substituted 14 specimens listed in the Book of the Dean of Christ This provision was one that certainly was resorted to Church, including minerals and fossil corals to which on more than one occasion. the classical canon applied a variety of conventional names and to which it attached a number of specific attributes. There were, for example, several omhrtae The early years of the Ashmolean in various shapes, some of them mounted in precious Downloaded from Within a year of the Ashmolean's opening Lhwyd metal, acknowledging their primarily amuletic inter- had completed the catalogue of over 600 shells est' these were held to originate in rain and thunder- (assigned to the Senior Proctor).15 The others fol- storms, and to be sovereign antidotes to poison.
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