R. Owen, On a National Museum of Natural History, pp. 53, seqq.
His collections had been a London marvel before he set out on his third voyage of discovery. He then possessed, I believe, almost sixteen thousand species, and they were regarded as a near approximation to a perfect collection, according to the knowledge of the time. |Comp. Athenæum as above, and the Museum returns of 1865 and subsequent years.| If the writer of the able notice of him which the Athenæum published immediately after his death was rightly informed, Cuming nearly doubled that number by the results of his final voyage, and by those of subsequent purchases made in Europe.
Very naturally, strenuous efforts were made to ensure the perpetuity of this noble collection during its owner’s lifetime. The history of those efforts still deserves to be told, and for more than one reason. But it cannot be told here. This inadequate notice of a most estimable man must close with the few words which, three years ago, closed Professor Owen’s annual Report on the Progress of the Zoological Portion of the British Museum. ‘The discoveries and labours of Mr. Hugh Cuming,’ he then wrote, ‘do honour to his country; the fruition of them by Naturalists of all countries now depends mainly on the acquisition of the space required for the due arrangement, exhibition—facility of access and comparison—of the rarities which the Nation has acquired.’ And then he adds a small individual instance, as a passing illustration of the value of Mr. Cuming’s life-long pursuit—‘Among the choicer rarities, ... brought from the Philippines in 1840, was a specimen of siliceous sponge (described and figured in the Transactions of the Zoological Society), known as Euplectella Aspergillum.’ Up to the date of Mr. Cuming’s death (tenth August, 1865), this specimen—of what, for non-zoological readers, may be likened to a sort of coral of rare beauty—brought over in 1840, was unique. |Transactions, &c., vol. iii, p. 203.| In the year next after the discoverer’s death, many fine and curious specimens were sent from the Philippines. The solitary explorer of 1839 had at length been followed by a school of explorers. Such men as Cuming live after their death, and hence the marvellous increase, within a very few years, in our knowledge of Nature, and of God’s bounty to the world he made.
J. R. Chorley and his collection of the Spanish Poets and Dramatists.
By a man who did but little in literature, although he possessed attainments which, in some respects, seem to have surpassed those of a good many men whose lucubrations have had much publicity and vogue, a valuable addition was made a few years ago, by bequest, to the Museum Library, both in the printed and manuscript departments. |Will of Mr. Rutter Chorley, 1866.| Mr. John Rutter Chorley had collected about two hundred volumes of the Spanish poetry and drama, and had enriched them with manuscript notes, bibliographical and critical. He had also prepared chronological tables of the dramatists—writing them in Spanish, of which he was a master—together with an account of their respective works. He had, I think, contemplated, at some future time, the preparation of some such book on the Spanish theatre as that published by Mr. Ticknor, many years ago, on Spanish literature at large. Whether the appearance of Ticknor’s valuable book deterred Mr. Chorley from prosecuting his purpose, I know not. Probably he was one of the many men the very extent of whose knowledge inspires a fastidiousness which prompts them to keep on increasing their private store, and to defer, almost until death overtakes them, the drawing from that store for the Public. If there may really, by some dim possibility, have been here and there an inglorious Hampden, or a mute Shakespeare, it is very certain that there have been, in literary history and in like departments of human study, many an unknown Disraeli, many a Tom Warton, brimful of knowledge about poets and poetry, who never could have lived long enough to put to public use the materials he had laboriously brought together.
George Witt and his collections illustrative of the History of Superstitions.
Of another Collector, whose pursuits lay at an opposite pole to those of Mr. Chorley, it would not be edifying to say very much in these pages. Some among the collections illustrative of the history of obscure superstitions (to quote the polite euphuism of one of the Museum Returns to Parliament) partake, in a degree, of the peculiar associations which connect themselves with the bare name of a place at which some few of them were really found—that too famous retreat of the Emperor Tiberius. Others of them, however, possess a real archæological value from a different point of view. All, no doubt, are characteristically illustrative, more or less, of the doings ‘in the dark places of the earth,’ and may point a moral, howsoever little fitted to adorn a tale.
Mr. George Witt, F.R.S., the collector of these curiosities of human error, was a surgeon who had lived much in Australia, and who, on his return from the Colonies, had retired to a provincial town in England, where, at first, he amused his leisure by gathering a small museum of natural history. Of that collection I remember to have seen a printed catalogue, but I imagine that he sold it in his lifetime, as no part of his objects of natural history came, with his other and much more eccentric museum, to the augmentation of the public stores. Towards the close of his life he lived in London, and used to amuse himself by exhibiting, and by lecturing upon, what he regarded as the more racy portion of his later collections. He chose (I am told) the hour of eleven o’clock on Sunday morning for such peculiar expositions, but I do not think that these ‘Sunday Lectures’ were regarded, either by the man who gave them or by his auditors, as especially fitted for ‘the instruction of the working classes.’
The Christy Museum and its founder’s history.
Of a very different calibre to Mr. George Witt was the donor of the noble Museum of Ethnography which, for want of room at Bloomsbury, still occupies the late donor’s dwelling-house, almost two miles off. It is not too much to say of Henry Christy, that he was both an illustrious man of science and an eminent Christian. The man whose fame as a searcher into antiquity is spread alike over Europe and America, is also remembered in many Irish cabins as one who was willing to spend, lavishly, his health and strength, as well as his money, in lifting up, from squalid beds of straw and filth, poor creatures stricken at once with famine and with fever, and so stricken as sometimes to have almost lost the semblance of humanity. He is also remembered by Algerian peasants, by West African negroes, and by Canadian Indians for like deeds of beneficence. When Prussian insolence and Prussian barbarity struck down Danes who were defending hearth and home, Christy was again the open-handed benefactor of the oppressed. When Turks were, in like manner, beating down by sheer brute force the Druses of Syria, Henry Christy was relieving the distressed and the down-trodden in the East, with no less liberality than he had evinced a little while before in relieving them in the North of Europe.