British Museum (Natural History) 
A century ago, a new museum was built to house the British Museum’s crowded, 
cobwebbed natural history collections. Since then, the London museum has become 
one of the world’s great scientific institutions 
This year, one of the world’s great 
scientific institutions, London’s Nat- 
ural History Museum, is celebrating 
one hundred years as a separate mu- 
seum. The British Museum (Natural 
History), as it is officially called, is 
best known for its role in education 
and the richness of its exhibitions, but 
as is true of so many fine museums, 
scientific research constitutes the bulk 
of the work carried out within its walls 
and on the expeditions and fieldwork 
it sponsors. For both of these func- 
tions — the educational and the sci- 
entific — the men and women who 
work in the museum today, and the 
visitors who throng its impressive 
halls, owe a tremendous debt to the 
men who brought the museum to life 
one hundred years ago. 
For more than a century the Natural 
History Museum had been an integral 
part of the British Museum in Blooms- 
bury, one and a half miles north of 
Charing Cross. By the middle of the 
nineteenth century, however, the 
growing collections of minerals, 
plants, fishes, fossils, and other trea- 
sures had put so much pressure on 
the limited space available in Blooms- 
bury that the decision was reached 
to house the natural history collections 
separately. From 1880 to 1883 the 
Natural History Museum moved from 
its crowded quarters in the British Mu- 
seum into a new home, complete with 
towers, spires, and navelike central 
hall, in South Kensington, three and 
a half miles west of Charing Cross. 
The history of both the “new” Nat- 
ural History Museum and its parent, 
the British Museum, began in 1753 
with a single Act of Parliament. The 
by William E. Swinton 
photographs by Lee Boltin 
act authorized the purchase of the 
collections of the distinguished and 
wealthy physician Sir Hans Sloane 
(1660-1753), and thus founded the 
British Museum. President of the 
Royal Society, president of the Col- 
lege of Physicians, physician general 
of the army, and physician to the 
queen, Sloane was also a botanist and 
avid collector. Montagu House, his 
home in Bloomsbury, became the new 
British Museum and housed the nat- 
ural history collections until shortage 
of space necessitated the move to 
South Kensington. 
Sloane was a member of Britain’s 
oldest natural history society, the 
Temple Coffee House Botanic Club, 
founded in 1689. The members of this 
organization approached their subject 
with boundless enthusiasm, combing 
Hans Sloane 
The Bettmann Archive 
the local countryside for plants and 
animals and meeting incoming ships 
to beg the sailors and passengers for 
exotic specimens. The collections that 
resulted were often heterogeneous and 
of little true scientific value. Sloane’s 
collections were in better shape than 
most, but since no arrangements had 
been made for their preservation, 
many of the specimens perished dur- 
ing the museum’s early days in 
Bloomsbury. Nonetheless, natural his- 
tory specimens were plentifully rep- 
resented in the new museum. 
Identification of specimens in the 
collections presented a great chal- 
lenge, however. Carolus Linnaeus, the 
great eighteenth-century Swedish bot- 
anist and physician, had met Sloane 
on a visit to London in 1736 and been 
much impressed with his collections. 
By helpful coincidence, 1753, the year 
that the British Museum was born, 
was also the year that Linnaeus pub- 
lished his Species Plantarum. In 1758, 
his Systema Naturae, regarded as the 
basis of modern zoological nomencla- 
ture, appeared in its tenth edition. In 
Europe at least, collected specimens 
could now be named in an understand- 
able manner, an advance that did 
much to promote scientific and medi- 
cal understanding. 
The museum’s early vicissitudes are 
well recorded. It was short of money, 
short of space, and short of staff. What 
staff the museum did have was usually 
volunteer and often included a large 
proportion of nonpracticing physi- 
cians — not surprising in a time when 
a medical degree was largely a degree 
in natural history. More than a century 
after the founding of the British Mu- 
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