EVOLUTION ON DISPLAY: PROMOTING IRISH NATURAL HISTORY AND DARWINISM AT THE DUBLIN SCIENCE AND ART MUSEUM

In 1890 the staff of the Dublin Natural History Museum began a comprehensive rearrangement of the collection in their care. Inspired by visits to American museums and motivated by a desire to produce a truly educational display, curators arranged the zoological collection to include cases on the history and geographical distribution of animals. These cases explicitly depicted, in words and specimens, the main arguments of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Placed at a ground-floor entrance to the museum, the cases invited the visitor to examine the remainder of the collection in terms of evolution by natural selection. The exhibit was supplemented by guidebooks and several lecture-demonstrations, which served to further reinforce its messages. Through an analysis of the exhibit’s development and contents, this paper will show how these cases reflected not only the status of evolutionary thinking in Ireland, but also the curators’ goals for the future development of Irish natural history. In 1896 the newly appointed director of the Dublin Science and Art Museum, Colonel G. T. Plunkett, announced a series of ‘Museum Demonstrations’, ‘ intended to correct the aimless and uninstructive inspection of the interesting articles in the Museum which is adopted by most of the visitors’. The demonstrations in the natural history section were given on winter evenings from December to March by the staff of the museum or by professors of the Royal College of Science for Ireland. Topics ranged over botany, geology and zoology. On 15 December 1896 nearly fifty ladies and gentlemen attended a demonstration on the ‘History of Animals’ given by George Carpenter, the assistant in natural history. In the flickering electric light, the guests viewed a ground floor which had been rearranged several times and was once again in the midst of reorganization. Apologizing for the disarray, Carpenter explained that the museum was attempting to group all Irish fauna together. The cases which were the subject of his lecture, however, were intact. Special attention and care had been taken in the * Department of History, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. E-mail : Juliana.Adelman@ nuigalway.ie. Thanks are due to Sam Alberti, Peter Bowler, Tim Collins, Michael Cronin, Martin Fanning, Sophie Forgan, Aileen Fyfe and the anonymous referees, all of whose comments greatly improved this paper. I especially thank Nigel Monaghan, Keeper of Natural History at the National Museum of Ireland, for access to the museum’s archives and his enthusiasm for the project. The cost for the use of the illustrations was generously covered by a grant from the Arts Faculty at the National University of Ireland, Galway. 1 ‘The museum demonstrations’, Irish Daily Independent, 4 December 1896, 5. 2 Report of the Director of the Science and Art Museum, Dublin, 1896, Dublin. 3 ‘Museum demonstrations: the history of animals’, Irish Daily Independent, 16 December 1896, 7. BJHS 38(4): 411–436, December 2005. f British Society for the History of Science doi:10.1017/S0007087405007351 arrangement of the History of Animals exhibit and the visitors could easily have read the numerous titles and cards which competed for their attention with the specimens. Starting from the left and reading to the right, these ladies and gentlemen would have viewed a didactic series which explained, in simple terms, evolution by natural selection (see Figures 2 and 3 below). The basic tenets of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species were spelled out and supplemented by contemporary lines of research which were thought to support the doctrine of descent. In the course of his lecture, Carpenter would clarify the terms and processes described in the cases, terms such as ‘variation’, ‘rate of increase’, ‘natural selection’, ‘mimicry’ and ‘sexual differences ’. Reading the labels, examining the specimens and listening to Carpenter would leave the visitors fully immersed in the latest thinking on the evolution of animals. Carpenter’s subject differed from previous ‘demonstrations ’ in that he sought to provide his audience not merely with scientific facts, but with a theory or framework into which facts about nature might fit. That the doctrine of descent according to Darwin was an appropriate subject, or one which would be met with enthusiasm, was not entirely obvious in Dublin in 1896. In fact, Darwin’s suggested evolutionary mechanism of natural selection was also suffering some loss of popularity among those devoted to the study of nature. Even so, the staff of the Dublin Natural History Museum felt that it was of such importance in popular instruction that they devoted a full wall of the crowded museum and several evening lectures to the subject. This paper will analyse the inspiration and goals of the History of Animals exhibit, completed in 1894, as a means of examining not only Irish reactions to Darwinism but also the development of Irish science and scientific institutions in the late nineteenth century. Museums and the history of science Museums have received increasing attention from historians of science, who have considered them as architectural monuments to science, as sites for scientific study and as sites for the popularization of the sciences, particularly natural history. Their 4 George Herbert Carpenter, ‘On collections to illustrate the evolution and geographical distribution of animals’, Report of the Proceedings of the Museums Association (1894), 106–44. 5 Peter J. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900, Baltimore and London, 1983. 6 Although the museum lost its status as an independent institution when it was subsumed under the Dublin Science and Art Museum (a part of the British Department of Science and Art) in 1877, I will refer to it as the Dublin Natural History Museum for the sake of brevity for the remainder of the essay. The politics of this transfer will be discussed in the following section. 7 See, for example, S. J. M. M. Alberti, ‘Placing nature: natural history collections and their owners in nineteenth-century provincial England’, BJHS (2002), 35, 291–311; Tony Bennett, ‘Speaking to the eyes: museums, legibility and the social order’, in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (ed. Sharon MacDonald), London, 1998; Sophie Forgan, ‘The architecture of display: museums, universities and objects in nineteenth-century Britain’, History of Science (1994), 32, 139–62; A. Kraft and S. J. M. M. Alberti, ‘ ‘‘Equal though different’’ : laboratories, museums and the institutional development of biology in late Victorian Northern England’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science (2003), 34, 203–36; Sharon MacDonald, ‘Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibition: an introduction to the 412 Juliana Adelman