ESSAYS 



The Art of Perpetuation (Bruce Cummings) 



JUST as the ancient hunter shot a fish with a spear, so we may imagine the ancient 

 philosopher separated the Thing, caught it up out of the Heracleitean flux, and 

 transfixed it with a name. With this first great preservative came the first great 

 museum of language and logical thought. Ever since we have been feverishly 

 busy collecting, recording, and preserving the universe or as much of it as is 

 accessible. Perpetuation has become an all-absorbing art. 



It is only recently that certain interesting, not to say remarkable, refinements 

 in the technique of the art have been developed and come into common use, such 

 being for example the museum, the printing press, the camera, the cinema film, 

 the gramophone record. By the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans the desire 

 to collect and above all to conserve the movable furniture of the earth was only 

 indistinctly felt. As storehouses, museums were almost unknown. Small col- 

 lections were made, but merely as the mementoes of a soldier's campaign, or a 

 mariner's curiosities, like the gorilla skins brought home from Africa by Hanno. 



The assembling of curiosities, drawing-room curios, bric-a-brac, and objets de 

 vertu was still the immature purpose of the conservator even so late as the days 

 of Sir Hans Sloane, Elias Ashmole, and John Hunter. Ashmole's gift to the 

 University of Oxford was laconically described as " 12 cartloads of curios." 

 Hunter's museum, as every one knows, was a gorgeous miscellany of stuffed birds, 

 mammals, reptiles, fossils, plants, corals, shells, insects, bones, anatomical pre- 

 parations, injected vascular preparations, preparations of hollow viscera, mercurial 

 injections, injections in vermilion, minerals, coins, pictures, weapons, coats of mail. 

 It is obvious that in those days the collector had not passed beyond the miscellany 

 stage. According to his pleasure, he selected say a Japanese midzuire, a scarab of 

 Rameses 1 1, a porpentine's quill, a hair from the Grand Cham's beard, and saw the 

 world as an inexhaustible Bagdad bazaar. Now he sees it as exhaustible, and is 

 grimly determined to exhaust it as soon as may be. 



To-day everything is changed. Mankind is astride of the globe from pole to 

 pole like Arion on the dolphin's back. With all the departments of human know- 

 ledge clearly mapped out in the likeness of his own mind, man now occupies 

 himself with collecting and filling in the details. He ransacks heaven and earth, 

 armies of collectors brigaded under the different sciences and arts labour inces- 

 santly for the salvation of the globe. All objects are being named, labelled, and 

 kept in museums, all the facts are being enshrined in the libraries of books. We 

 are embarked on an amazing undertaking. A well-equipped modern expedition 

 apparently leaves nothing behind in the territory traversed save its broad physical 

 features, and as Mont Blanc or the Andes cannot be moved even by scientific 

 Mahomets, the geologist's hammer deftly breaks off a chip, and the fragment is 

 carried off in triumph to the cabinet as a sample. 



It is estimated that there are about seven millions of distinct species of insects, 

 and naturalists the world over have entered upon a solemn league and covenant 



680 



