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The elephant, which has been for some time expected at these grounds, arrived in town, and will be immediately placed in the gardens for the gratification of the curious in natural history. 1 Mr Calder stated that on Friday afternoon, passing through College-Green, he perceived a horse after falling down in the street beneath a load on a dray. A crowd was collected about the animal; several persons were beating him cruelly in order to force him to rise, but he could not do so from his exhausted state. 2 An elephant in the Dublin Zoological
At the turn of the nineteenth century, museums in Europe and North America were at their largest and most powerful. New buildings were bigger; objects flooded into them, and more people visited them than ever before. The Manchester Museum is an ideal candidate for understanding cultures of display in twentieth-century Britain. It is a treasure trove of some four million priceless objects that are irreplaceable and unique. Like many large European collections, the origins of the Manchester Museum are to be found in a private cabinet: that of John Leigh Philips. This book traces the fate of his cabinet from his death in 1814. The establishment of the Manchester Natural History Society (MNHS) allowed naturalists to carve out a space in Manchester's cultural landscape. The Manchester Museum's development was profoundly affected by the history of the University in which it operated. In January 1868, the Natural History Society formally dissolved, and an interim commission took control of its collections; the Manchester Geological Society transferred its collections the following year. The new collection was to be purely scientific, comprising geology, zoology and botany, with no place for some of the more exotic specimens of the Society. The objects in the collection became part of Manchester's civic identity, bringing with them traces of science, empire and the exotic. Other museological changes were afoot in the 1990s. Natural history collections became key sites for public engagement with environmental issues and biodiversity and more recently as sites for exhibiting art.
anatomy museum of King’s College, London. 16 His passion for zoology and later for anthropology were also probably inspired by Flower. In 1884, Flower was appointed Director of the new British Museum (Natural History) with the support of Thomas Huxley, replacing the anti-Darwinist Richard Owen. That same year, Albert Günther (1830–1914), the German-born ichthyologist was chosen for the post of Keeper of Zoology; Thurston would become one of his regular Indian correspondents. Although Günther never really expressed his
Counting the coppers: John Jennison and the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens Michael Powell and Terry Wyke counting the coppers In spite of the fact that it closed its gates to the public over a generation ago, Belle Vue remains one of Manchester’s best-known popular attractions. Its memory has been kept green by a number of local historians in books and on websites and by sporadic campaigns in the local press for it to be brought back.1 Nostalgic reminiscences of visiting Belle Vue – of the zoo, the shilling bobs and the rest – were a commonplace in the Manchester
partial. Actually removing animals from the city proved a much more difficult task than thinking new thoughts or writing new bye-laws. In addition to piggeries, Dublin contained at least thirty private slaughterhouses in 1981. Laws created during the nineteenth century actually appeared to prevent the city from removing them. 3 The Dublin Cattle Market remained until 1971, but, as of 2020, only a few horses, abundant pets and the zoo’s exotic residents retain any kind of welcome in the city civilised by beasts. A brief look at the fates of the Dublin Zoological
mahogany shelves of the Gabinete, thanks to the zeal of ministers and the obedience of subjects. The truth, of course, was rather more complex. Zealous officials certainly played a critical role in the acquisition of specimens, both botanical and zoological, whilst Spain’s vast and long-established American territories undoubtedly gave it an advantage over some of its European rivals. Collecting natural
wilderness full of opportunities for sportsmen in the field of big game hunting. The potential of the Arctic as a destination for the hunter was amply demonstrated by the static and touring menageries and the development of zoological gardens, which provided showcases for the display of the dramatic and often exotic Arctic fauna. When it was not possible to exhibit live fauna, specimens of stuffed animals
physically ordering and examining topography and geology, scientific concerns fed into the colonial encounter with southern African landscape affecting the responses of artists to atmospheric effects, foreground scenery, accurate zoological depictions and colour effects. This chapter will discuss how such constructions of landscape spaces were deeply informed by a prevailing interest in scientific
, often acrimoniously. As William Boyd Dawkins’s influence waned, zoology challenged geology’s intellectual and physical place in the disciplinary hierarchy of the museum. Mapping this shift onto the wider politics of British science has been beyond the scope of this book, but parallels between the emphasis on evolutionary zoology in the Manchester Museum and the development of neo-Darwinism in biology more generally are suggestive. And from what we know of botany’s fate in other collections, its subordinate role in Manchester (in exhibitionary terms at least) is
peril and treachery due to the availability of venom. Just as Richard II dreams of conscripting spiders, toads, and adders, English Renaissance drama often invokes venomous creatures in ways that collude with English dominion over the planet and human empire over the wild through knowledge of the zoological other. In Antony and Cleopatra , however, Shakespeare also counters this mindset with the