Grant Museum of Zoology

This excercise in perambulation starts, as many things do, with my childhood.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for museums, culitvated by what in hindsight seem like almost weekly trips to the Australian Museum on the corner of College and William street.  It has, I know now, one of the best biology departments in the world. But it also has skeletons, lots and lots of skeletons.  And from the whale hanging across the entry foyer, to the replicated Texan Allosaurus watching the entry corridor I loved bones as a child, I still do, there's something inherently fascinating about them.

My mother and father no doubt fervently hoped that I would fulfill this longing for dead things by becoming a biologist, and not a serial killer.  But as it so happens I did neither, instead that strange curiosity for skulls and femurs persisted as a cursory interest and nothing more.  As it so happens, this place was made for me.

The institution itself was founded in 1827 by one Robert Edmund Grant, who I cannot help but assume must have shared my stated interests, but the museum has an itensely practical purpose as well.  When the newly instated Grant sought to begin teaching the field of Zoology to students of the new University of London, he found to his dismay that there were no resources, no tangible links to the animal kingdom with which to demonstrate to his students, enter morbid insanity. 

 

While it is accurate enough to say that Grant was widely regarded as an astute man of science and a leader in his field, he left little impact on the course of popular history.  His name probably means as little to you as it does to me, unless you're a student of biology, or a sponge*, but under his tutelage a young student of natural sciences, Charles Darwin, would definitely go on to write something of value.

Now more than 177 years old the collection continues to grow.  In this manner, perhaps because of it, some of the things you find in the Grant Museum could only be described as a little, well, weird.  Now it's not as though I'm squeamish, or live in denial of the wondrous advances in scientific understanding that such research has produced.  But for goodness' sake, a jar of moles?  An entire jar?  What sort of scientific discourse requires the preservation  of that surrealist's nightmare?  I am of course aware that animals to be dissected need to be stored in some fashion, but that particular item didn't seem like it was available for usage in exam sessions. 

In every other way the place is entirely fascinating and only serves to prompt me to wonder at the means by which man accrued knowledge in the midst of the 19th century.  Setting out across the world in search of strange new horizons, noting their exotic biospheres and documenting bizarre creatures, before killing them all and storing them in jars.

*Grant's research into sponges and molluscs proved unequivocally that both were indeed members of the animal kingdom.  Yeah, the whole 'history passed him by' thing makes just that little bit more sense now doesn't it?