145
Oxford, which received and established its bequest in 1677. It was that tradition that
later inspired the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich (1786–1854) to help establish
the oldest museum in Asia in 1814, the Oriental Museum of the Asiatic Society,
later known as the Indian Museum of Calcutta.
10
He also became a long-lasting
superintendent of that city’s first botanic gardens. Other public floral spaces, in
Philadelphia, and a medicinal garden in New York, had already opened their doors.
11
The brief history of museum culture gives us the zeal of not quite regret but concern. Some archaeologists hold that the oldest-known museum remains in the Dhi
Qar Governorate of modern-day Iraq, dating to 530 BCE, to the last of Babylonia,
the Ennigaldi-Nanna Museum, where objects, such as clay tablets, are described in
three languages.
12
Every museum-like revelation, of connections there in front of us that invite
contemplation, should prepare us in a manner not unlike that deeply telling conjecture conveyed by Elisabeth Tova Bailey in her compelling speculations on the longevity of snails. She wonders whether their legendary pertinacity would allow them
to survive an Ice Age, and asks malacologist Tim Pearce who is not entirely pessimistic on the subject. But when Bailey envisions the snails trying to outpace the
advancing rivers of ice, she clearly feels the fast-arriving reach of the cold air, the
weather turning into storm semipermanently, triggering who knows which primeval
snail survival modes, as they bury themselves and prepare for the long hibernation.
“I thought of a tiny snail with a glacier bearing down on it,” she writes. But over the
course of thousands—tens and hundreds of thousands—of years, their passionate
life forces would be unlikely to match.
13
And it will be of no small curiosity to visit Rome’s eternal Galleria in a thousand
years. Under water? Under ice? A desert? Redecorated in some form. Because the
veins and muses of museums are the nuances of tumult that is ecological culture. No
artist or history of historians can brave the biosphere without instructive consequences
14
(Fig. 16.2).
10 See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early
Modern Italy, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1994.
11 See the Kew Gardens site on Wallich at, https://web.archive.org/web/20120112235432/http://
www.kew.org/collections/wallich/index.htm, Accessed March 20, 2019.
12 See American Eden – David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic,
by Victoria Johnson, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W. W. Norton & Company,
New York, 2018.
13 See Museums.EU, http://museums.eu/highlight/details/105317/the-worlds-oldest-museums,
Accessed March 20, 2019.
14 See Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Algonquin Books Of Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
2010, p. 108.
16.2 Museological Nostalgias
Oxford, which received and established its bequest in 1677. It was that tradition that
later inspired the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich (1786–1854) to help establish
the oldest museum in Asia in 1814, the Oriental Museum of the Asiatic Society,
later known as the Indian Museum of Calcutta.
10
He also became a long-lasting
superintendent of that city’s first botanic gardens. Other public floral spaces, in
Philadelphia, and a medicinal garden in New York, had already opened their doors.
11
The brief history of museum culture gives us the zeal of not quite regret but concern. Some archaeologists hold that the oldest-known museum remains in the Dhi
Qar Governorate of modern-day Iraq, dating to 530 BCE, to the last of Babylonia,
the Ennigaldi-Nanna Museum, where objects, such as clay tablets, are described in
three languages.
12
Every museum-like revelation, of connections there in front of us that invite
contemplation, should prepare us in a manner not unlike that deeply telling conjecture conveyed by Elisabeth Tova Bailey in her compelling speculations on the longevity of snails. She wonders whether their legendary pertinacity would allow them
to survive an Ice Age, and asks malacologist Tim Pearce who is not entirely pessimistic on the subject. But when Bailey envisions the snails trying to outpace the
advancing rivers of ice, she clearly feels the fast-arriving reach of the cold air, the
weather turning into storm semipermanently, triggering who knows which primeval
snail survival modes, as they bury themselves and prepare for the long hibernation.
“I thought of a tiny snail with a glacier bearing down on it,” she writes. But over the
course of thousands—tens and hundreds of thousands—of years, their passionate
life forces would be unlikely to match.
13
And it will be of no small curiosity to visit Rome’s eternal Galleria in a thousand
years. Under water? Under ice? A desert? Redecorated in some form. Because the
veins and muses of museums are the nuances of tumult that is ecological culture. No
artist or history of historians can brave the biosphere without instructive consequences
14
(Fig. 16.2).
10 See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early
Modern Italy, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1994.
11 See the Kew Gardens site on Wallich at, https://web.archive.org/web/20120112235432/http://
www.kew.org/collections/wallich/index.htm, Accessed March 20, 2019.
12 See American Eden – David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic,
by Victoria Johnson, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W. W. Norton & Company,
New York, 2018.
13 See Museums.EU, http://museums.eu/highlight/details/105317/the-worlds-oldest-museums,
Accessed March 20, 2019.
14 See Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Algonquin Books Of Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
2010, p. 108.
16.2 Museological Nostalgias