Dinosaur in a Haystack by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould
Language: eng
Format: epub

18

Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive, O!

In Dublin’s fair city, at the heart of Georgian elegance near Trinity College and the Old Parliament House, stands an anatomically correct statue of Molly Malone. I do not speak of Molly herself, who may or may not be properly rendered (I didn’t particularly notice), but of her legendary wares. She holds two baskets, one full of cockles and the other of mussels—not quite “alive, alive, o!” in their bronzed condition, but clearly sculpted as accurate representatives of the appropriate species. The artist has respected zoological diversity by representing the song’s complete natural history. (To comment on diversity of another diversity of another valued kind, I never understood why the song’s third verse include the only non-rhyming couplet in such a consistent and admirable ditty: “She died of a fever; and no one could save her.” But then I realized that these words do rhyme in Ireland—just as “thought” and “note” rhyme in Yorkshire, and therefore in Wordsworth.)

Just a few blocks from Molly and right next to the Dail (the modern Parliament of the Irish Republic) stands the Dublin Museum of Natural History. This museum traces its origin to a private association of fourteen citizens, founded in 1731 as the Dublin Society. The first public exhibit (largely of agricultural implements) opened in 1733 in the basement of the Old Parliament House, mentioned above. George II provided a royal charter in 1749, and Parliamentary grants began in 1761. Growing collections required a new building, and a government grant of five thousand pounds, made in 1853, largely financed the present structure. Lord Carlisle, the Lord Lieutenant and General Governor of Ireland, laid the foundation stone in March 1856. His lordship, speaking in orotund tones suited both to Victorian practice and to the dignity of his official title, expressed a hope “that the building about to arise on this spot…may, with its kindred departments, furnish ever-increasing accommodation for the pursuits of useful knowledge and humanizing accomplishments, and open for the coming generations worthy temples of science, art, and learning, at whose shrine they may be taught how most to reverence their creator, and how best to benefit their fellow creatures.”

I learned these details of the museum’s history in a fine pamphlet by C.E. O’Riordan, titled The Natural History Museum Dublin. The museum building, though harmonizing with its earlier Georgian surroundings in exterior design, could not be more quintessentially Victorian within. Two fully mounted, magnificently antlered skeletons of the fossil deer Megaceros giganteus—informally, if incorrectly, called the Irish elk—greet visitors at the entrance to the ground floor (while a third skeleton, of an unantlered female, stands just behind). The rest of the ground floor mostly houses representative collections of Irish zoology, phylum by phylum and family by family (a case on the “roundworms of Ireland” or “Irish crabs” certainly conveys an impression of admirable thoroughness in coverage).

The remainder of the museum, a first floor and two galleries above, seems even more frozen into its older style of full and systematic presentation.

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