Tffls View of Life 



Cabinet Museums Revisited 



'.-packed Victorian displays still contain up-to-date messages 



Jam 



by Stephen Jay Gould 



In Dublin's fair city, at the heart of 

 Georgian elegance near Trinity College 

 and the Old Parliament House, stands an 

 anatomically correct statue of Molly Mal- 

 one. I do not speak of Molly herself, who 

 may or may not be properly rendered (I 

 didn't particularly notice), but of her leg- 

 endary wares. She holds two baskets, one 

 full of cockles and the other of mussels — 

 not quite "alive, alive, o!" in their bronzed 

 condition, but clearly sculpted as accurate 

 representatives of the appropriate species. 

 The artist has respected zoological diver- 

 sity by representing the song's complete 

 natural history. (To comment on diversity 

 of another valued kind, I never understood 

 why the song's third verse included the 

 only nonrhyming couplet in such a consis- 

 tent and admirable ditty: "She died of a 

 fever; and no one could save her." But 

 then I learned that these words do rhyme 

 in Ireland — just as "thought" and "note" 

 rhyme in Yorkshire, and therefore in 

 Wordsworth.) 



Just a few blocks from Molly and right 

 next to the Dail (the modem Parliament of 

 the Irish Republic), stands the Dublin Mu- 

 seum of Natural History. This museum 

 traces its origin to a private association of 

 fourteen citizens, founded in 1731 as the 

 Dublin Society. The first public exhibit 

 (largely of agricultural implements) 

 opened in 1733 in the basement of the Old 

 Parliament House. George 11 provided a 

 royal charter in 1749, and parliamentary 

 grants began in 1761. Growing collections 

 required a new building, and a govern- 

 ment grant of five thousand pounds, made 

 in 1 853, largely financed the present struc- 

 ture. Lord Carlisle, the lord lieutenant of 

 Ireland, laid the foundation stone in March 

 1856. His lordship, speaking in orotund 

 tones suited both to Victorian practice and 



to the dignity of his official title, expressed 

 a hope 



that the building about to arise on this 

 spot... may, with its kindred departments, 

 furnish ever-increasing accommodation for 

 the pursuits of useful knowledge and hu- 

 manizing accomplishments, and open for 

 the coming generations worthy temples of 

 science, art, and learning, at whose shrine 

 they may be taught how most to reverence 

 their creator, and how best to benefit their 

 fellow creatures. 



I learned these details of the museum's 

 history in a fine pamphlet, The Natural 

 History Museum Dublin, by C. E. O'Rior- 

 dan. (You may buy your copy of this gov- 

 ernment document at the museum itself, as 

 I did, or you may pick one up at the Gov- 

 ernment Publications Sales Office at the 

 memorable address of Molesworth Street, 

 Dublin.) The museum building, although 

 harmonizing with its earlier Georgian sur- 

 roundings in exterior design, could not be 

 more quintessentially Victorian within. 

 Two fully mounted, magnificently 

 antlered skeletons of the fossil deer 

 Megaceros giganteus — informally, if in- 

 correctly, called the Irish elk — greet visi- 

 tors at the entrance to the ground floor 

 (while a third skeleton of an unantlered fe- 

 male stands just beyond). The rest of the 

 ground floor mostly houses representative 

 collections of Irish zoology, phylum by 

 phylum and family by family (a case of 

 the "roundworms of Ireland" or on "Irish 

 crabs" certainly conveys an impression of 

 admirable thoroughness in coverage). 



The remainder of the museum, a first 

 floor and two galleries above, seems even 

 more frozen into its older style of full and 

 systematic presentation. Cast ironwork 

 and dark wood cabinets, the mainstays of 

 Victorian exhibition, abound. Copious 



Ught enters through the glass ceiling and 

 streams around the shadows made by cab- 

 inets and their contents. Heads and horns 

 adorn the walls in profusion, and we won- 

 der for a moment whether we are visiting a 

 museum or a lord's trophy room. 



The ensemble seems so coherent that 

 we might view the entire display as an em- 

 bodiment of a blueprint in the head of 

 some Victorian museum worthy under the 

 spell of John Ruskin. In fact, as with any 

 living entity, the exhibits were melded, 

 fused, reordered, and cobbled together 

 over many decades — although these par- 

 ticular decades did end quite some time 

 ago. The horns were not installed until the 

 1930s, but most of the other exhibits have 

 changed Uttle since Victoria and, later, her 

 son Edward VII ruled this land — or at 

 least since the locals demoted Edward's 

 son George V to establish the Irish Free 

 State in 1921. 



O'Riordan, who provides a meticulous 

 account of every change in venue for any 

 stuffed bird or seashell, also acknowledges 

 twentieth-century stability. He discusses a 

 massive rearrangement, begun in 1895, to 

 establish the current scheme of Irish spec- 

 imens on the ground floor, with a run- 

 through of worldwide Linnaean order on 

 the first floor and galleries above. He 

 writes: "The recruitment of extra staff in 

 1906 enabled work on the invertebrates on 

 the top gallery to proceed quickly and this 

 was completed by 1907. The exhibition on 

 the upper floor and gaOeries has not radi- 

 cally changed since." He then mentions 

 the addition of several Irish elk skulls to 

 the ground floor exhibit in 1910 and com- 

 ments: "Apart from relatively minor alter- 

 ations in the content and disposition of the 

 exhibits, the overaU theme and plan of the 

 exhibition has since remained the same." 



12 Natural History 1/94 



