Carolus Linnaeus 
The Bettmann Archive 
seum. Prime Minister Gladstone, dur- 
ing an escorted tour of the museum, 
was astonished to hear that people 
were actually paid to work there. 
Not everyone appreciated the visual 
encyclopedia beginning to take shape 
in Bloomsbury. In William Make- 
peace Thackeray’s The Virginians , 
one character expresses the critical 
opinion that some Londoners held of 
the new museum: “By George, I don’t 
know where the town’s running. 
There’s Montagu House made into a 
confounded Don Saltero’s Museum, 
with books and stuffed birds and rhi- 
noceroses.” (The catalog of Don 
Saltero’s Museum, a once popular 
London museum, is now owned by 
the British Museum.) 
The new museum was, indeed, no 
bonanza for the public. Only small 
parties of “respectable” people were 
allowed in for guided tours that lasted 
half an hour. Yet around the country, 
more and more respectable people, es- 
pecially the landed classes, were be- 
coming interested in gardens and hor- 
ticulture and in the frequently lavish 
books being published on these sub- 
jects. Similarly, as the museum’s col- 
lections grew, so did the number of 
people who, influenced by the increas- 
ingly popular fields of archeology and 
the natural sciences, wanted to see 
for themselves the bounty of nature 
housed in the museum. 
The names of the early keepers of 
the Natural History Department in 
Bloomsbury may mean little today, 
but they belong to men who were im- 
portant in the formation of the mu- 
seum and in the scientific world of 
the time. For example, the keeper 
from 1765 to 1773 was Matthew 
Maty, a Dutch physician from Leiden, 
who as a fellow of the Royal Society 
and, later, foreign secretary of that 
distinguished body was scientifically 
influential. He apparently had an aver- 
sion to museum visitors and doled out 
passes reluctantly. His successor was 
the great botanist Daniel Solander, 
a favorite student of Linnaeus. Com- 
ing from Sweden, Solander played an 
important part in introducing the Lin- 
naean system to Britain. Learned and 
urbane, he traveled around the world 
with Capt. James Cook and Sir Joseph 
Banks, botanist and patron of the sci- 
ences. Solander’s influence on the mu- 
seum was great, and his participation 
in the intellectual activities of the 
time, including membership in the 
Royal Society and the Lunar Society, 
enhanced the prestige of the museum 
and brought additions to its collec- 
tions. 
The last of the early keepers of the 
Natural History Department, E.W. 
Gray, saw the museum through the 
change of centuries. As it moved into 
a wonderful era of new knowledge, 
the museum struggled to keep its col- 
lections in some semblance of order. 
The department was expanded and 
given a new name: Department of Nat- 
ural History and Modern Curiosities. 
Its first keeper, George Shaw, was 
given no money to go with this long 
title, however, and so, he “wrote for 
booksellers.” Accounts of the collec- 
tions report that owing to inevitable 
neglect, “the basements of Blooms- 
bury resemble the catacombs at Pa- 
lermo, where one is opened every day 
of the year, merely to deposit fresh 
subjects for decay.” Some of the more 
Matthew Maty 
The Granger Collection 
decayed specimens in the Sloane col- 
lection had to be burned. 
But then the intellectual spring ar- 
rived. In 1807 the Geological Society 
of London was founded, and in 1826 
the Zoological Society of London. 
John James Audubon’s Birds of Amer- 
ica was published in London in 1827, 
and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Ge- 
ology appeared in 1 830, the same year 
the Royal Geographical Society was 
founded. The next year, at York in 
the northeast of England, the British 
Association for the Advancement of 
Science was inaugurated, and in the 
city of Plymouth in the southwest, a 
young naturalist named Charles Dar- 
win stepped on board a little ship 
called the Beagle. In 1833, the Royal 
Entomological Society opened its 
doors, followed by the Botanical So- 
ciety of the British Isles in 1836. Brit- 
ain’s scientific community was never 
to be the same. Specimen logged and 
cobwebbed as it was, the British Mu- 
seum enjoyed a growing reputation 
during this period. In 1818, William 
MacGillivray, age twenty-three, 
walked the eight hundred miles from 
Aberdeen, Scotland, to London in six 
weeks just to see the museum’s natural 
history collections. Apparently satis- 
fied with his visit, he returned by boat 
to Aberdeen, where he became pro- 
fessor of natural history. Charles Dar- 
win, writing to his sister in 1833 about 
the wonders of South America, 
claimed that if he had not been able 
to undertake his travels, he “would 
be a ghost and haunt the British Mu- 
seum.” 
Throughout the first half of the 
nineteenth century, the museum grew 
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