Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. Richard Fortey
evolutionist. He opposed Darwin vigorously, even after the latter’s theory of evolution had won the day among the intellectual class in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Owen’s vision of a natural history museum was as a kind of paean to the Creator, a magnificent tribute to the glory of his works, a roll call of the splendid species created by His munificence and love for mankind. The words that I used to sing as a child put it thus: ‘All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small/all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.’ The cathedral-like entrance to the great new museum, the nave-like main hall, those columns with their decking of leaves or biological swirls, they all had a message. Here was a temple to nature that was also a shrine to the Ancient of Days.
Owen was an establishment figure par excellence. He knew the Prime Minister William Gladstone very well in the 1860s, and had even been a tutor in natural history for the royal children at Buckingham Palace. No museum figure of modern times has been so close to the seat of power. Owen knew how to make things happen, and his persistent lobbying eventually yielded dividends in the form of Alfred Waterhouse’s vivid new building. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, was sympathetic to housing natural history collections in his developing cultural ‘theme park’ in Kensington, and opposite the industrial crafts of the ‘V&A’ along Exhibition Road. The Prince’s effigy, covered in gold, still broods over the Albert Hall a few minutes’ walk north of the Museum on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Owen was trusted to design a museum with sufficient seriousness to satisfy the Victorian sense of self-improvement through knowledge, or as the Keeper of Mineralogy put it in 1880: ‘the awakening of an intelligent interest in the mind of the general visitor’. Owen certainly intended to display in the main hall what he called an ‘index museum’ of the main designs of animals in nature, intended to be a kind of homage to the fecundity and orderliness of the Creator. However, by 1884 when the Museum formally appointed its first Director, William Flower, the principle of evolutionary descent seemed to be the only acceptable way to organize nature for explanatory purposes. The cathedral had been hijacked for secular ends, and the temple of nature had become a celebration of the power of natural rather than supernatural creativity.
Richard Owen in old age with the skeleton he helped to reconstruct of theextinct New Zealand moa, the world’s largest bird.
Richard Owen with moa skeleton. From Richard Owen, Memoirs on the extinct wingless birds of New Zealand. Vol 2. London: John Van Voorst, 1879, plate XCVII.
There are large marble statues of both Charles Darwin and his famous public champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, on display in the Natural History Museum. There is also a bronze of Richard Owen. Few visitors seem to notice them, or pause to read their plaques. Darwin and Huxley look out over a refreshment area on the ground floor, so the great men contemplate a clutter of tables rather than the grandeur of nature.* A seated Darwin is in the splendour of his old age, every inch the bearded patriarch; Huxley, seated nearby, is brooding and imperious. Richard Owen stands around the corner, in academic dress, halfway up the main flight of stairs facing the main entrance. His hands are slightly outstretched, and at least to my eye there is something clerical about him, as if he were offering a blessing rather than a specimen, although his face is still fierce and commanding. The formality and equality of white stone have somehow ironed out the differences between Darwin and Huxley; it is their enquiring spirit that pervades the Museum. They have become the saints in the place. Oddly, the dark bronze of Owen seems more out of place, as if its metallic heaviness were symbolic of the arguments lost to the presiding genius of Darwin, beatified in marble.
It is curious to reflect that the differences that separated these two men, the bronze and the marble, still count today, well over a century later. London is dotted with memorials to its great scientists. Newton is in the Royal Society; Michael Faraday stands outside the Institute of Electrical Engineers on the Embankment. Yet nobody challenges the insights that Faraday or Newton had into the workings of the world (while recognizing, of course, that understanding has also moved on). Yet there are those who would still side with Owen, against Darwin and Huxley, on the subject of biological evolution – they would seek to reverse their respective historical roles and, no doubt, cast out the marble statues. This view is predicated on the idea that evolution is ‘just a theory’; and that other theories – which in fact mean only ‘creation science’ or its close relative ‘intelligent design’ – deserve an equal airing. There are some important and interesting matters hidden away in this argument. There are, indeed, some theoretical issues in evolutionary theory that are still being investigated; indeed, there are whole journals devoted to such questions. Furthermore this is what science is about – probing questions, not just giving ‘the answer’. Physics and chemistry are no different in this regard – they are full of theories in the process of being tested. So are cosmology and economics. But the crux for the statue of Darwin is a third consideration. The issue of ‘creation science’ is not the kind of theoretical question about kin selection that might be found in a scientific journal, it’s about whether evolution happened at all. Put bluntly, it is about whether or not we share a common ancestor with a chimpanzee. The descent of all life through evolutionary processes is not a ‘theory’ in the sense that the creationists would have us believe. So overwhelming is the evidence for evolution by descent that one could say that it is as secure as the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way around. Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom, and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world. So those who promulgate ‘creation science’ are trying to pull off a trick of intellectual legerdemain, a mind jump concealed by jiggery-pokery, mixing in the truly theoretical with what most scientists would simply refer to as the fact of descent. The effect is to try to turn the clock back to a time when immutable versus mutable species was actually a serious debate, a period when Owen and Darwin might have been thought evenly matched for a while. Like Prince Albert, Owen might have finished up gold-plated and Darwin relegated to a back room somewhere in Dry Storeroom No. 1 if only the facts had turned out differently. History has been kinder to Owen than might have been the case. He is recognized as one of the leading anatomists, an outstanding scientific organizer, and instigator of a great museum, even if his dreams for it were transmuted.
The marble statue of Charles Darwin, in wise old age.
Seated statue of Charles Darwin. Photo © Natural History Museum, London.
The hidden rationale behind the displays in any natural history museum I can call to mind is evolutionary, at least as a kind of organizing principle. It does not have to be like that. I can easily imagine an interesting museum in which organisms were arranged by size or colour, or by their utility to mankind. Storage of all the specimens behind the scenes is an entirely different matter, for that has to be systematic. I understand that there is a now a Creation Museum in Kentucky. Its own creators doubtless regard it as a ‘balance’ to all those pesky ‘evolutionary’ museums. It is interesting that the embodiment of respectability for an idea is still a museum, as if a Museum of Falsehoods were a theoretical impossibility. I look forward to a Museum of the Flat Earth, as a counterbalance to all those oblate spheroid enthusiasts.
The Natural History Museum is just one of many in the United Kingdom, and its story could be matched in almost any European country or in North America. The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world. Museums grew up everywhere, as a kind of symbol of seriousness. Universities founded their own reference collections, some of which grew and prospered. Cambridge University has a collection for almost every science department, and Oxford University acquired one of the most beautiful museums of natural history in