The Booth Museum
Thursday, September 15th, 2005 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthThe Booth Museum, in Hove, is a natural history museum of the old school. It's full of stuffed birds -- collected over nearly a century, from 1837 to 1934, and arranged in 'typical' habitats -- as well as skeletons (the whale skeleton smelt rather unpleasant) and a collection of moths and butterflies from around the world. (See here for a sample of moths). There's also a wheel of colour-coded specimens: you rotate it to see each one under a 'microscope' (magnifying camera) and work out what the specimens of the same colour have in common. Once you've worked it out, you open the appropriate drawer to view ... more specimens. The mammal drawer (shown here) was especially poignant: stuffed weasel, stuffed stoat, little bones.
There's also the 'world's most famous toad': a toad found in a hollow flint in 1898. Current theory is that the toad crawled in whilst very small, fed on the occasional insect, and grew until it couldn't get out. It died, was mummified and now travels around the world.
I was most interested in the display on Flint. From the presentation, I'd guess this was put together in the 1960s. It contained various common flint fossils, and an account of some of the superstition and weird science around them: flint 'hands' (actually sponge-fossils) as evidence of antediluvian humans, sea urchin fossils ('thunderstones') as good-luck charms -- many are found in Neolithic tombs -- to ward off lightning strikes. There was a thriving gun-flint industry in Sussex well into the 20th century. And now I know that the word for a wall with flint pebbles arranged in a grid pattern is 'flint-coursed'.
One hopeful fossil hunter (Henry Willett, writing in 1871) expressed the wish that "If the inspection of this collection should help one young man to find his pleasure, or to spend his spare time in this direction, rather than to waste it in billiards or idleness, then it will not have been formed or presented in vain." Collection as a moral virtue: never mind the education.
There's also the 'world's most famous toad': a toad found in a hollow flint in 1898. Current theory is that the toad crawled in whilst very small, fed on the occasional insect, and grew until it couldn't get out. It died, was mummified and now travels around the world.
I was most interested in the display on Flint. From the presentation, I'd guess this was put together in the 1960s. It contained various common flint fossils, and an account of some of the superstition and weird science around them: flint 'hands' (actually sponge-fossils) as evidence of antediluvian humans, sea urchin fossils ('thunderstones') as good-luck charms -- many are found in Neolithic tombs -- to ward off lightning strikes. There was a thriving gun-flint industry in Sussex well into the 20th century. And now I know that the word for a wall with flint pebbles arranged in a grid pattern is 'flint-coursed'.
One hopeful fossil hunter (Henry Willett, writing in 1871) expressed the wish that "If the inspection of this collection should help one young man to find his pleasure, or to spend his spare time in this direction, rather than to waste it in billiards or idleness, then it will not have been formed or presented in vain." Collection as a moral virtue: never mind the education.
