Next to the exhibition, the former director of the ZMA, dr. Sandrine Ulenberg, commissioned the publication of a book on the rich treasures and history of the ZMA. The book, in Dutch, is entitled “Duizend en meer verhalen op sterk water; 13 miljoen dieren” and will appear shortly.

It is a great source.  You can search for animals, using modern dutch names, modern latin or even the nineteenth century latin names.

Look at this beauty!

First a new building was envisioned for all three of them. To put the museum and the university laboratory in one building was a major breakthrough but also something to be expected. The relation between the state museum and the university zoologists was at that time better than it had ever been before. Both were lead by German friends of the late Wilhelm Moritz Keferstein (1833-1870).  The state museum’s director was Hermann Schlegel (1804-1884); the chair in zoology at the university was Emil Selenka (1842-1902).

But a new zoological laboratory was soon built somewhere else; Selenka had been asking for it since 1868 and when the money was finally allocated he didn’t want to wait for the others. He had at that time grown impatient with the civil servants of the Dutch state. Maybe he foresaw things.

In the mean time, civil servants decided that it would not be wise either to join the academiegebouw with the new museum, and so they decided to build two new buildings and, well, why not put two committees on it?

A team was sent out to study museums of natural history in other large cities, like Berlin, Paris and London. This team existed of three members. The first was  J. B. A. J. M. Verheyen, a roman catholic and conservative member of parliament. The second was the famous architect Pierre Cuypers, who had developed many churches, who had also developed the new Rijksmuseum and who was to develop the new Amsterdam central train station. The third member was one of the museum’s curators, the liberal evolutionary biologist Ambrosius Hubrecht who also happened to be the son of the secretary-general of the ministry of the Interior. They wrote a report on these foreign musea and based on these visits they came up with a design for the new museum.

They created this:

In my dissertation on late nineteenth century Dutch biologists and the imperial state I will look into the matter with a bit more detail. What I can tell you at the moment is that it was not built in the end. (Well, that is a fact easily induced from the absence of such a building in Leiden.)  

The director of the museum, Schlegel, came with a competing design himself; Hubrecht would leave the museum to pursue a career at the university of Utrecht as professor in zoology; Cuyper would work on other projects. In the 1880s, the allocated money was silently taken away from the national budget. Why?

Was it because Dutch and national museums never were and never will be a winning team?

1. Philipp Leopold Martin, Atlas zur Praxis der Naturgeschichte. Erster Teil: Taxidermie enthaltend die Lehre vom Sammeln, Präparieren, Präparieren, Konservieren und Ausstopfen der Tiere und ihrer Teile; nebst einem Anhang über Sammeln von Pflanzen, Mineralien und Petrefakten, Weimar:  Bernhard Friedrich Koch 1898.

2. Johann Friedrich Naumann, Taxidermie oder die Lehre Thiere aller Klassen am einfachsten und zweckmässigsten fuer Kabinette auszustopfen und aufzubewahren. Halle: Hemmerde & Schwetschke 1815.  [online]

Naumann (1815), plate 3

In his introduction Naumann also mentions the following manuals which he consulted for his own manual:

3. Karl Philipp Christian Stein, Handbuch des Zubereitens und Aufbewahrens der Thiere aller Klassen. Frankfurt a.M.: Bernhard Koerner 1802. [online]

4. Römer, Anleitung alle Arten natürlicher Coerper, als Saeugethiere, Voegel, Amphibien, Fische, Pflanzen u.s.w. zu sammeln und aufzubewahren. Nebst einer Anweisung, wie Insekten in ihren verschiedenen Verwandlungsepochen zu behandeln sind. Zürich: Drell, Gessner, Fuessli und Comp. 1797. [online]

5. Anonymous, Gründliche Anweisung Vögel auszustopfen und besonders gut zu conserviren. Leipzig: Adam Friedrich Böhme 1788. [online]

My question would be: Do you know other (nineteenth century) taxidermic manuals? I would also be interested in similar manuals for plants and minerals…

To be continued.

I will not go into the story into detail but will move on to the fact that Johan Japetus Steenstrup really existed. Those who are able to read Scandinavian languages I refer to his wikipedia site in Danish.  It is a typical mid-nineteenth century man working at the university doing both laboratory and museum research. He was the one who gave the giant squid his scientific name.

What interested me was that I came across a publication of a Dutch zoologist Pieter Harting at the same time that I was reading the novel. It was an article called  ’Description de quelques fragments de deux cephalopodes gigantiques’, in the Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1861. This publication is still used nowadays as a most helpful reference for those who want to study the giant squid or more specifically, its type. Later researchers  also suggested a species called Architeuthis hartingii.

Pieter Harting was at the time director of the zoological museum of the university of Utrecht. He had been an expert in microscopical anatomy and botanical physiology and also wrote on chemistry and geology. He had been a professor at Utrecht university since 1843, teaching students in medicine how to use the microscope. However, only after 1858 he  secured a chair in a specific ‘discipline’: zoology. With this chair came the directorship of the university’s zoological cabinet.

From the 1860s onwards he integrated his microscopical observatory into the zoological cabinet and created a ‘zootomic laboratory’. An important aim of this laboratory was the education-motivated research of marine invertebrates.  Marine invertebrates like molluscs and protozoans were key groups for researchers who not only wanted to fill out the gaps in taxonomy but who also were toying with all kinds of affinities between the species. Many took from Ovid the idea of life being born in the sea: ’vidi factas ex aequore terras’.

For example, Lamarck, Geoffroy, Milne-Edwards, Darwin and Haeckel were all nineteenth century experts in specific groups of marine invertebrates. Like Darwin and Haeckel, Harting accepted the idea of a genealogical relationship between all species of plants and animals.

I wonder what Harting thought when he first started to dissect the remains of a giant squid, used as he was to do microscopical research of plant cells, slices of human tissue and small amounts of soil. Did he think ‘what on earth am I doing know?’ Or did he have a plan?

To be continued…

So here’s one for you: does it help history of science to categorize these different practices (and therefore, to establish limits around them) according to how (“Humboldtian”) and where (“field”) science was being carried out, or should we focus on more on disciplines? By “disciplines” I mean the what that science was interested in. In the case of zoology, for example, I’m thinking of describing and classifying (taxonomy), studying structure (anatomy), understanding processes (physiology), understanding geographical patterns (biogeography), and so on. This are modern terms, I know, but it seems to me that every one of our heroes had a very clear idea about which of these disciplines belonged to his kingdom, and which did not. These “disciplines” were forming from the end of the 18th century on, and were defined around the 1840′s.

You might want to read this for a discussion: http://science.jrank.org/pages/49151/Humboldtian-science.html

This blog aims at providing a platform for sharing information in the field history of Natural History with a special focus on the nineteenth century. The scope of this blog is wide-ranging: beside theoretical reflections, we are interested in recently published monographs and articles, upcoming conferences, interesting sources, available online ressources, etc. …