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HISTORICALLY
SPEAKING
lt is not known with any certainty as to when taxidermy first
emerged as a art/craft within civilised society . As mentioned
earlier, the ancient Egyptians practiced a form of taxidermy
in animal mummification, but this process of preservation
would qualifies itself more as a process of specimen embalming
than taxidermy under the true definition.
None the less, it was a preservation technique, one in which
keys to past civilizations were encapsulated behind liniment
soaked cloths rather than spirit filled bottles or glass and
acrylic cases.
In its infancy it is believed that taxidermy evolved from
the desire by European scientists of the day to preserve specimens
of nature for the purpose of future studies and comparison.
From the earliest times, plants had formed an essential part
of mans diet. The common ones were known to most people and
cultivation by communities for their usage was an age old
management procedure. Plants were also used as medicaments,
and professional apothecaries (pharmacists/chemists of the
era) were constantly searching for plants from which new medicines
could be obtained, which in turn expanded their interest of
botany.
The first museum in Britain, the Ashmole Museum, began as
a cabinet of curiosities donated to the University of Oxford
in 1677 by Elias Ashmole. This cabinet comprised of a collection
of rare and curios items that Ashmole had received under somewhat
controversial means, when he acquired the Tradescant collection
by deed of gift. The collection had originally been willed
to Tradescants widow upon his death, but in 1659 the collection
passed from the Lambeth Museum to Elias Asmole in Oxford.
Known as John Tradescants Ark of Lambeth, it had culminated
from the families interest shared by both John Tradescant
the Elder (1570-1638) and his son of the same name, in collecting
items of curiosities, both cultural and natural history.
As gardeners to royalty, the Tradescants had travelled the
continents of the time, in search or rare plants to import
back to Britain.
The Elder John Tradescant first travelled in 1609 to Europe
whilst under the employ of Robert Cecil (who was later to
become the first Earl of Salisbury), and brought back varieties
of flowers and fruits for the gardens at Hatfield. In later
years he was to be involved in further trips to Russia and
Algiers.
By 1626 he leased a house in Lambeth where he began to develop
his own garden and cabinets of curiosities displaying all
things rare and curious he had collected in his travels. It
became one of the first museums of its kind in Britain and
unlike other collections that were only favoured to the eyes
of the socially elite of Britain, its doors were open to
people of all social persuasion-- at the price of 6
pence a head.
One of the most notable pieces of natural history to exist
from the collection was that of a stuffed Dodo bird, formally
an inhabitant of Mauritius, which became extinct in the early
part of the 17 th centuary.
In 1638 an account of a live Dodo in Britain was given by
English theologian, Sir Hamon L 'Estrange . Described as a
great fowl, larger than the largest Turkey Cock, and so legged
and footed,but stouter and thicker,and of erect shape.
Its keeper described it as being fond of swallowing pebble
stones, a trait which was exhibited in front of Hamon and
the other witnesses who had accompanied him to the viewing
of this strange bird housed in London.
Little is further known of the fate of this specimen , though
it is speculated that the bird was eventually stuffed and
was the same bird that made its way into the hands of Elias
Ashmole, and finally the
University of Oxford.
In that same year of 1638 an account of the Tradescants
museum by German traveller Georg Christoph Stern, is given
in which a detailed description of items contained
within the collection is given . Amongst those items were
small mammals of the likes of squirrels and bats,
fish, fossils and a reference to samples
of birds inclusive of a pelican, goose, grouse and a variety
of brightly colored birds from India. No mention is made of
the Dodo which was to later become part of the curiosities
of the Tradescants Ark.
In 1656 a catalogue of the Tradescants collection was sent
to print including with it a record of the contents of both
the Ark and its adjacent gardens. Funded exclusively by Elias
Ashmole, this catalogue , entitled
Musaeum Tradescantianum was the first of its kind published
in Britain.
The Society of Apothecaries became the first permanent society
of naturalists in Britain, and it is recorded that in 1673
this Society acquired the Physic Garden at Chelsea England
in which to grow drug plants. The collecting of natural curiosities
reached a peak in the eighteenth centuary. In England Sir
Hans Sloane was to accumulate one of the most important botanical
collections of the period, one that was to eventually form
the basis of the British Museum in Bloomsbury England. Sloane
described the cocao plant – the fruit of which is used
to make chocolate, and was in fact one of the first to recognize
the food value of this plant. At the time of Sloanes death
in 1753 he had amassed a vast collection of natural history
material, comprising of 100,000 specimens, 50,000 books, 3500
volumes of manuscripts and 350 volumes of drawings and illustrated
books.
However, it was the 337herbarium volumes of dried plants together
with the seeds and drugs that were recognised as the most
important part of the Sloane collection. Sloanes collection
was purchased by an act of parliament in 1753, and eventually
moved to Montague house in Bloomsbury, a rural suburb of London,
and in 1759 The British Museum then opened its doors to the
public.
As the collections of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
grew in size many became the museums of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Amongst some of these collections was
that of Alba Seba, a Dutch collector whos private museum comprised
of thousands of specimens of natural history specimens. Sebas
collection was eventually auctioned off in 1752 and the specimens
dispersed all over the world. Over a century later, twenty-five
mammals, one fish and one snake, stored as spirit specimens
in bottles from the Seba collection were all purchased by
the British Museum. They were recognised as those similar
to samples illustrated in Seba’s catalogue Thesaurus
published in 4 volumes between 1736 and 1765.
1748 was a years in which the French physicist and naturalist,
Rene Antoine Ferchault Reaumur was attributed with publishing
a paper specifically detailing taxidermy. Reaumur interest
as a naturalist is best known for his exhaustive study of
insects,( published in 6 volumes 1734-42 ), his work on regeneration
in crayfish, and his studies that showed corals to be animals
and not plants
During the second half of the eighteenth centaury, no branch
of science in Great Britain or Europe for that matter developed
as rapidly as natural history, a term used from about 1750
to include the animal and plant kingdoms, and, in some popular
works the mineral kingdom as well.
However the mid to late seventeenth century was a volatile
period in British history. Great Britain who had been at war
with the Danes, was now at war with France. As a consequence
taxes levied at the American colony to pay for military protection
by King George 111 were beginning to create hostilities and
resentment against the crown, something that was to change
the course of history for both Great Britain and America.
Despite these pressures of foreign affairs on the privileged
and Royalty of Britain, private collections of natural history
were being accumulated in stately homes across the country
from the vast assortment of material arriving back from English
colonies. At this stage, these collections were generally
heterogenous assemblages of shells, insects, birds, minerals,
dried plants and fossils.
Only a few individuals were selective in their acquisitions
for the purpose of scientific collections, men of the calibre
of John Latham who collected the skins of birds and would
later refer to them in his scientific publications A General
Synopsis of Birds, published in parts in London 1781-1785.
Whilst exploration and colonisation had been the prime objective
in mounting expeditions to unknown lands, once these areas
had been marked on a map by explorers of the likes of James
Cook and interest kindled by the sight of unusual specimens
of native fauna and flora from these new frontiers, others
of the likes of the Frenchman Francois Levaillant were enticed
to make journeys of their own in search of new natural history
specimens. The cargoes from these private expeditions, together
with the collections formed by commercial trading companies,
government - sponsored scientific
expeditions, and by almost everyone who travelled anywhere,
resulted in a deluge of specimens entering England and Europe
in the later part of the 18 th and early 19 th centuries.
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