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Where is the damned collection? 83
‘Where is the damned collection?’ Charles Davies
Sherborn’s listing of named natural science
collections and its successors
Michael A. Taylor1
1 School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester & Department of Natural Sciences, National Museums
Scotland, Chambers St., Edinburgh EH1 1JF, Scotland (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1495-8215)
Corresponding author: Michael A. Taylor (mat22@le.ac.uk)
Academic editor: E. Michel |Received 28 May 2015 | Accepted 28 May 2015 | Published 7 January 2016
http://zoobank.org/109EE95D-9C64-47F4-9AF6-E77789B511B3
Citation: Taylor MA (2016) ‘Where is the damned collection?’ Charles Davies Sherborn’s listing of named natural science
collections and its successors. In: Michel E (Ed.) Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century
and beyond. ZooKeys 550: 83–106. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.550.10073
Abstract
C. D. Sherborn published in 1940, under the imprint of Cambridge University Press but at his own ex-
pense, Where is the – Collection? is idiosyncratic listing of named natural science collections, and their
fates, was useful, but incomplete, and uneven in its accuracy. It is argued that those defects were inevitable,
given Sherborn’s age and wartime conditions, and that what might seem one of Sherborn’s less impressive
works was in fact a pioneering work highly inuential in stimulating the production of successor works
now much used in curation, and in systematic and descriptive biology and palaeontology. e book also
contributed to the development of collections research in the natural sciences, and the history of collec-
tions and of museums.
Keywords
Charles Davies Sherborn, collections, geology, biology, taxonomy, museums
ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
doi: 10.3897/zookeys.550.10073
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Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
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Introduction
Charles Davies Sherborn (1861–1942) was a geologist and above all a scientic bibliogra-
pher (Anonymous 1942b, [Hinton] 1942, Norman 1942, 1944, Grin 1953, Cleevely
2004, Dickinson 2016, Evenhuis 2016, Shindler 2016, Welter-Schultes et al. 2016). His
last signicant publication was a small book called Where is the – Collection? (Fig. 1a, b; Sher-
born 1940). is paper describes the book’s genesis and content, and assesses its signicance
at the time, the value of its contained information, and its importance as a precedent and
nucleus for systematics, curation and collections-historical research in the natural sciences.
Sherborn did not explicitly give his reasons for writing the book. It is evident from
his introduction that the aim was to help researchers, and especially systematists, locate
named collections, and thereby particular specimens: the important point is that the
collections were named. e dash in the title is usually taken as standing for the name
of the relevant collection, but Sherborn once privately called his book “Where is the
damned Collection?” (Norman 1944, p. 81), and one reviewer commented that “e
diculty of discovering the resting place of some important specimen [...] doubtless
justies the ‘blue-pencilled’ word which the author may or may not have hinted at in
the title” (Ritchie 1940, p. 80; “blue-pencilled” here means censored as an expletive).
Figure 1. A e cover of Where is the – Collection? B A sample page (p. 29) from Where is the – Collec-
tion?, including the entry for John Calvert. e Sowerby women are thought to be the daughters of G. B.
Sowerby I (1788–1854) (R. J. Cleevely, pers. comm. 2014).
A B
Where is the damned collection? 85
Sherborn’s book was, strictly speaking, not the rst listing of collections. Cleevely
(1983, p. 9) records sporadic lists of collections published as early as 1812, and notes
the presence of collections location data in a listing of geologists in the Fossilium Cata-
logus series (Lambrecht et al. 1938). Sherborn himself noted (p. 5) a prior listing of
fossil insect collections, and the listing of some British collections in his own Catalogue
of British fossil Vertebrata (Woodward and Sherborn 1890).
One of the most important early general works on fossils was Sowerby’s Mineral
Conchology (Cleevely 1983, pp. 7, 9, 11, 14–16). Sherborn (1935) published a paper
that listed all the collectors mentioned by the Sowerbys in this work (1812–1846); he
cited the references that helped to identify the 237 collector / collections listed. is
was a particularly interesting meta-analysis as 28 of those collectors were women, and
often very signicant participants, such as Etheldred Benett (1776–1845), contrary to
the impression one sometimes gets from the secondary and popular literature of today
that Mary Anning was almost the only female collector in this period. Certainly Sher-
born’s listing of the collectors who provided material for the Sowerbys must have been
an important preliminary stage of compiling Where is the – Collection.
However, in its wide scope, Where is the – Collection? was for decades unique as
a practical reference which listed such information on named natural sciences col-
lections and their fates as he had come across in his decades of work at the British
Museum. Sherborn’s interests meant that the emphasis was on palaeontological and
malacological collections, mainly in Britain, with a sprinkling of other categories such
as mineralogy, ornithology, and botany, and manuscripts. Sherborn also commented
on collections which had been destroyed, for instance by re or ood.
Methods
In this paper, for space reasons, and because they feature strongly in Sherborn’s book,
I use palaeontological collections as my main examples, but in fact similar develop-
ments occurred across the entire eld of natural science collections. Sherborn’s book
was a listing of named collections rather than an institutional directory, so I here use
“collection” in the sense of a collection of specimens made by a named person or body,
rather than the holding institution as a whole. Admittedly this denition is still am-
biguous; for instance, it includes both eld and cabinet collectors (cf. Torrens 2006,
Lucas and Lucas 2014). Sherborn did not attempt to produce a listing of institutions
either directly, or indirectly by indexing, and I therefore do not cover lists of institu-
tions in detail (but do refer to them when relevant). However, Sherborn did include
some institutional collections, especially when they had been transferred and dispersed
amongst other institutions: eectively, they became collections under the name of the
original institutions. e modern equivalents of 1940 values are determined using the
Bank of England ination calculator (URL: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/educa-
tion/pages/ination/calculator/ash/default.aspx, accessed 23 January 2014).
References, archives and repositories: where only pagination is given in a refer-
ence, Sherborn’s book (1940) is intended. “British Museum”, in the usual shorthand
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
86
of Sherborn’s time, here denotes the British Museum (Natural History), London, now
the Natural History Museum. Repository abbreviations: BMNH, British Museum
(Natural History), now NHM; CUL, Cambridge University Library, West Road,
Cambridge CB3 9DR, England; Cambridge University Press, University Printing
House, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS, England; NHM, Natural History
Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD, England.
Origin and content
In a guide to sources for collections research in the rst Newsletter of the new Geological
Curators Group (GCG), Hugh Torrens called Sherborn’s book “the only primary source
on collections known to me”, and described it admirably (Torrens 1974, pp. 12–13):
[e book has] 149 pages but every other one is blank to allow annota-
tion. [...] It is scarce only 500 copies having been printed. is is an account of
the various Natural History Collections which Sherborn came across between
1880–1939. It is not exhaustive or always accurate but contains an immense
amount of information. Furthermore it is often fascinating reading. [...] His
biography by J. R. Norman [1944] [...] is also equally entertaining reading.
His primary interests were geological and palaeontological so there is a useful
[for GCG members] bias towards these collections in his book. [...] it had
amazingly to be published at his own expense.
Sherborn said that the book contained “facts accumulated over sixty years in
answer to inquiries”, and that its “original MS” had “been on my table at the British
Museum (Natural History) and of daily use to the Sta or others” (p. [5]). Norman
(1944, 80–81) added that “much of his material was collected from old sale catalogues,
biographies, obituary notices, museum guides” and the like. No doubt much of
Sherborn’s information came as a by-product to his work on Index Animalium, but
Sherborn plainly carried out additional research, as shown by his le of MSS notes
and clippings (still in the BMNH libraries in the 1970s, R. J. Cleevely 1983, and pers.
comm. 2014). Examples are Sherborn’s inquiries for John Phillips’s fossils (see below),
and his searches through journals such as Gentleman’s Magazine and Notes and Queries,
of which he bought 143 volumes for the purpose (Norman 1944, p. 81).
Sherborn completed his literature searches around March 1939, and in due course
nished his manuscript and sent it to the Museums Association. He later reported the
disappointing results to a friend in a letter of 27 December 1939:
... that astute body [the Museums Association] hummed over it for two
months, and this tho’ I oered to pay for it, that I sent for the MS. back, [and]
sent it on to the Cambridge [University] Press [...] (Norman 1944, p. 81).
Where is the damned collection? 87
Sherborn already had an excellent relationship with the Press, who reportedly
called him the “best editor” with whom they had ever worked (Norman 1944, p. 79).
On 22 November 1939 he wrote to them, evidently as part of an ongoing discussion
(CUP archive, CUL UA Pr.A.S.429):
By the by, you might say if you would undertake the publishing, I to pay
cost of printing, to keep say fty copies and give you the remainder if you pay
me say 1/6 on all sold copies. is is only a suggestion as I shall want some
publisher on the T[itle]. P[age]. and would rather you than anyone.
Sherborn suggested a price of 3/6 or 4/6 (3/6, three shillings and sixpence in pre-
decimal United Kingdom currency, is nominally equivalent to 17.5p today but then
worth much more). e Press Syndicate decided at its meeting of 8 December 1939
to “undertake the publication of his proposed catalogue of Natural History References,
on commission” (CUL UA Pr.V.82, Syndicate Minutes for 1935–1939). e standard
‘Memorandum of Agreement’, i.e. a printed contract for printing and publishing the
book at his expense, survives in the Contract Archive at CUP (K. ompson, Brand Pro-
tection Ocer, CUP, pers. comm. 2014), bearing Sherborn’s MSS annotations. Sher-
born evidently returned it with a covering letter of 12 December (CUL UA Pr.A.S.429).
Amongst other matters, he conrmed a print run of 500 copies of which he was to have
50, and suggested that the Times Literary Supplement and Nature were “the only papers
likely to be of advertising value of such a book, but I leave it to you”. He specied bind-
ing in paper: “I cant aord the cloth. Rest of cash available for you when asked for, do
not increase it more than you can help for this is a bit of an eort on my part.”
Sherborn soon reported to his friend in the letter of 27 December 1939 cited above:
[...] Cambridge Press [...] accepted my terms, set it up at once, in ten days the
whole proofs went back to Cambridge, and it will be printed and ready by mid-
January. Cost me £70, sells at 3/6, 500 copies. So thats that. (Norman 1944, p. 81).
He would need to sell 80% of all copies to recoup his £70, even ignoring other
costs (which apparently included 12.5% commission to CUP specied in the Memo-
randum). e risk was not trivial as £70 was equivalent to almost £4000 in 2012 values.
But to call it ‘a bit of an eort surely reected his habitual economy rather than actual
poverty, as he was relatively well o (Norman 1944, but see Shindler 2016). After Sher-
born’s death, his estate would be valued at £11,619; his executors later sold the copyright
and all rights in the stock of the book to CUP for £5 5s (Anonymous 1942a; England
& Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858–1966,
probate granted at Llandudno, 5 September 1942; receipt attached to Memorandum of
Agreement in CUP Contract Archive).
e Press Syndicate Minutes for 2 February 1940 report that the agreement with
Sherborn was ‘completed’, whatever that meant (CUL UA Pr.V.82). e printing and
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
88
binding were in any case done in time for the nal bill, dated 5 April 1940, which came
to just under the expected £70 (Fig. 2). e book was out in time to be reviewed in the
20 July 1940 issue of Nature (Ritchie 1940). An initial search of the CUP archives and
of sales catalogues for the period has not turned up any record of an ocial publication
date (R. Grooms, CUP Archivist, CUL, pers. comm. 2014), but this may simply reect
the book’s anomalous nature, the lack of advertising, and the wartime conditions.
Sherborn’s letter of 27 December gives the impression that he withdrew his book
from the Museums Association because of the Association’s dilatoriness, but he does
not give any reason for this delay. It is possible that the Association had reservations
about the book itself, especially if it had the book assessed by the same person who
later reviewed it harshly for the Association’s Museums Journal (quoted below, “C.
M.”, 1940). Another possibility is that the Museums Association feared that some
entries were defamatory. Sherborn was seemingly inclined to unrestrained criticism at
times. In 1888 the Royal Society of London refused him support for his bibliography
of foraminiferans because of his savage review of a foreign rival (Miller 2016, Shindler
2016). In a 1905 letter to Arthur Smith Woodward, then Keeper of Palaeontology,
Sherborn described the British Museum’s Chalk echinoderms as “disgraceful mate-
rial” (NHM Archives DF 100/39/256; P. M. Cooper, pers. comm. 2014). Sherborn
Figure 2. e nal bill from Cambridge University Press, tipped into a copy of Where is the – Collection?
in the NHM Library. Photo courtesy R. J. Cleevely, NHM.
Where is the damned collection? 89
was just as forthright in his little book, noting for instance that Professor W. J. Sol-
las (1849–1936) “destroyed the Phascolotherium jaw” of an exceptionally rare Jurassic
mammal in the James Parker collection at Oxford (p. 105). e University Museum’s
curators have never forgiven Sollas, who was trying to study the jaw’s internal structure
through serial sectioning, a crude and inherently destructive predecessor of computed
tomography (Vincent 1994, pp. 28–29, 39).
As part of the standard agreement, Sherborn had to indemnify Cambridge Uni-
versity Press for any libel or copyright claims, and in his letter of 12 December (CUL
UA Pr.A.S.429) he said, “[...] please read items Groom and Calvert. All parties are
long since dead and my remarks are historically valuable and should stand if possible.”
Charles Ottley Groom (1839–1894), an impostor who called himself the Prince of
Mantua and Monferrat, went by the Scottish lairdly title of Napier of Merchiston
(Davenport-Hines 2004). Sherborn described him as a “notorious rogue and thief,
tried to kill omas Davies [presumably the geologist (1837–1912)] by dropping a
boulder upon him from a high ladder in Tennant’s shop in the Strand” (p. 63). And
Sherborn’s account of John Calvert (1814–1897), fraudster, traveller, self-proclaimed
mining expert, and mineral collector, was the “most notorious entry in his otherwise
genial catalogue of collectors” (Fig. 1), stimulating later research by several historians,
according to Cooper (2006, pp. 86–87). In fact, Sherborn seems to have attributed to
John some of the doings of Albert (1872–1946), John’s also unscrupulous and then
still alive grandson - or son: the Calverts were never too clear about this (Birman 1979,
Rothwell 2010, Cooper 2006, pp. 85–105). e Press took the precaution of sending
the original proofs of those two entries (but nothing else) to Field Roscoe & Co., a
London rm of solicitors, on 1 January 1940, and the rm replied the next day, saying
that “there is no doubt that the passages in question are defamatory”. But there was
no problem if Calvert and Groom were dead, so long as a small change was made to
avoid giving the inadvertent imputation of dubious behaviour on the part of one W.
G. Ball, who had been selling Calvert’s material on behalf of another rm of solicitors
lumbered with it in lieu of a bad debt (CUL, CUP archive, UA Pr.AS.429; Cooper
2006, p. 101). Sherborn was evidently willing to alter his text, for Mr Ball does not
appear in the book.
Sherborn’s comments on some museums obviously did not worry the Press, even
though English libel law allows corporations to sue. But they might have created a
sticking point for the Museums Association, because some of its institutional members
were mentioned unatteringly. He referred to “the way this local museum [Liverpool
Museum] has treated types”, Elgin Museum as “a dump of useful stu uncared for”,
and Wilson’s insects “in Perth Mus[eum]. in ‘shocking state’”, and even the Stebbing
collection in the British Museum itself where “most of the spirit had evaporated and
specimens were practically useless” (pp. 11, 49, 111, 127, 145; his Perth seems to be
that in Scotland rather than Australia, from the admittedly incomplete match of other
‘Perth’ entries with Stace et al. 1987).
However, it seems just as likely, if not more so, that the Museums Association’s
real problem with the book lay in its timing. Time must have pressed grievously on
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
90
Sherborn while he sought to publish this last work of any substance. He was, from
1934, unable to work for long periods, and was becoming increasingly aged and un-
well, suering signicant deterioration in 1938, and an episode of poor health in the
winter of 1938–1939. He now had to cope with the outbreak of a war whose likeli-
hood he had professed not to take seriously (Norman 1944). e British Museum’s
sta and facilities were already being diverted to wartime priorities, and Sherborn
would know very well from his Great War experiences how severe such disruption
could become. If Sherborn and the Cambridge University Press were as ecient as
they seem to have been, then the manuscript was presumably with the Museums As-
sociation during September and October 1939, give or take a few weeks either way: in
other words, the period of nal mobilisation, the declaration of war on 3 September,
and the rst few weeks of war. e Museums Association would have been hugely dis-
tracted by the problems which the war posed for its members and itself, and Sherborn’s
book would have seemed a very low priority. Perhaps the Association never even got as
far as actually considering Sherborn’s proposal.
In hindsight Sherborn was wise to take the initiative by abandoning the Museums
Association, and pushing through the book’s rapid publication elsewhere. His sister
died in January 1940, he developed heart disease at the end of 1940, and his last years
were a time of increasing wartime disruption at both home and the British Museum,
especially after the destructive air raids from September 1940 and the closure of the
libraries in 1942, the year of his own death (Norman 1944).
Assessment
Sherborn’s book was uneven, with the biases in subject content already noted. It was
organized only by collector, without any indexing by holding institution. It was inad-
equately edited. e brevity of its sometimes cryptic entries, with inconsistent names
and abbreviations for the Royal Scottish Museum, for instance, annoyed the Nature
reviewer (Ritchie 1940) – surely James Ritchie (1882–1958), Professor of Zoology at
the University of Edinburgh, and previously Keeper of Natural History at that same
museum. Doughty (1984, p. 160) described the book as “sometimes a little obscure,
veiled [...] in the pedant’s sophist[r]y and waggishness”. I am more inclined to ascribe
this to the book’s origin as a collection of notes which acted as personal memory-jog-
gers. e entry for Street Museum in Somerset (now the Alfred Gillett Trust) (p. 129)
says in part “Nothing of value except the Ichthyosaurus (E. I. White 1934). Wallis of
Bristol had a pick of specimens and books”. Sherborn obviously knew what this meant,
but the reader needs some background knowledge to conclude that, presumably, Errol
White (1901–1985), palaeontologist at the British Museum, had made comments to
Sherborn about a visit in 1934, and that Dr F. S. Wallis (d. 1979), Director of Bristol
City Museum, had helped with a partial dispersal. Sometimes the reader is left tanta-
lised. “Weeks – (formerly Cox). Had the mechanical spider” (p. 141) actually refers
to a popular automaton in the museum of mechanical curiosities in Tichborne Street,
Where is the damned collection? 91
London, ca. 1803–1835, assembled by a person named Weeks and stemming, at least
in part, from the 18th century collection of James Cox (c. 1723–1800) (Coleman et
al. 1902, Altick 1978, Smith 2008). And despite recent studies (Hodgkinson 2006,
Miller 2016), one is left in the dark as to why the foram worker Fortescue W. Millett
(1833–1915) “kept his rare books in the W. C. under the seat” (p. 97). Did Sherborn
mean that Millett had an ultra-superior throne carefully integrated into the room’s
wood panelling, with convenient bookshelves designed in? Or was this a triple pun on
rare, rear (as in backside), and rears (as in English “public school” slang for lavatories)?
e book, as Sherborn himself admitted, was “not exhaustive; that were too much
to expect and almost an impossibility” (p. [5]). Nor is the book particularly reliable in
detail (Torrens 1974, pp. 12–13, Cleevely 1983, p. 9). Sherborn stated (p. 107) that
some of the fossil collection of John Phillips (1800–1874) was stolen and dumped in
the River ames, but this is now known to be an exaggeration of another author’s
canard - though he did take the trouble to check the Blackfriars Bridge engineers’ re-
cords (Torrens 1975b, Edmonds 1977, Cleevely 1983, p. 231, Nikolaeva and Morgan
2010). e collection of the Wernerian geologist and mining engineer omas Weaver
(1773–1855), “used to form hard core of a urinal at Bewdley” (p. 141), seems in fact to
have been the unwanted residue after sales and donations to museums (Torrens 2004).
ere is some evidence that Sherborn simply decided to stop work and go to print,
rather than delay any longer, even if it meant cutting corners. He and his friend W.
D. Lang (1878–1966) both cited a relatively unusual source for Mary Anning (1799–
1847), a Lyme Regis guidebook (p. 9, Fig. 3 here; Brown [1857], Lang 1950, Taylor
and Torrens 2014). Yet Sherborn's entry completely fails to mention her numerous
and important Liassic vertebrates in the British Museum. It is true that she did not
amass much of a personal collection, being a commercial collector who sold her nds,
but this cannot be the reason as the same omission recurs in the entry for omas
Hawkins (1810–1889) (p. 67, Fig. 4 here)(Torrens 1995, Evans 2010). is suggests
that Sherborn did not systematically collate his manuscript with the ocial history of
the British Museum’s collections (British Museum (Natural History) 1904–1912),
or have it read over by colleagues such as Lang and the palaeoherpetologist W. E.
Swinton (1900–1994). Perhaps this was because of wartime disruption. However, the
Museums Journal reviewer noted other examples of Sherborn’s failure to collate infor-
mation from other publications, even ones which Sherborn had cited (“C. M.” 1940).
Wartime conditions surely meant that the book received fewer reviews and notices
than it might otherwise have had. Even the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of
Natural History, co-founded by Sherborn, did not print one till 1943 (Anon. 1943).
Reviewers generally noted the book’s incompleteness and, to some extent, unreliabil-
ity, while focussing on their own areas of expertise. e Quarterly Review of Biology re-
viewed it in 1940 (Anon. 1940), and the ichthyologist George S. Myers (1905–1985)
of Stanford University assessed it, sympathetically but briey, in Copeia (Myers 1941).
Sherborn’s friend Frederick Chapman (1864–1943), of the National Museum, Mel-
bourne, discussed mainly Australian collections in another sympathetic review in Vic-
torian Naturalist (Chapman 1942). A hatchet job in the Museums Journal was perhaps
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
92
Figure 3. A sample page (p. 9), including the entry for Mary Anning. is misses her specimens in the
British Museum (Natural History).
written by Claude Morley (1874–1951), an entomologist linked to Ipswich Museum
(“C. M.” 1940, p. 73): “the book cannot be described as one which the enquirer may
consult with a reasonable probability of nding the whereabouts of any particular col-
lection, even a large one”. ere was some truth in this; in Nature, Ritchie (1940) not-
ed the omission of important collections in his own Royal Scottish Museum, including
that of Hugh Miller (1802–1856) – though, despite Ritchie’s comments, Sherborn
was right to mention Miller fossils in Cromarty (Waterston 1954). e CUP archive
contains an album with reviews and notices pasted in, presumably recording those
known to the Press (CUL, Cambridge University Press newspaper clippings S-1940).
Apart from those already mentioned, it contains pieces from Extraits de la Revue des
Questions Scientiques (no details, in English); Science Newsletter, 17 August 1940;
Biological Abstracts, Vol. 15, No. 5, 1941; Ciencia, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1941 (in Spanish);
and Mexican Society of Natural History, No. 4, Vol. 1, 1941 (in Spanish).
Where is the – Collection? might, at rst sight, seem an anticlimactic end to Sher-
born’s career, and the least impressive of his works especially when compared to his
11-volume Index Animalium. It was, of course, a work of its time. Given Sherborn’s
age and the war, he had to publish what he had when he did, or not at all. A separate
Where is the damned collection? 93
issue is that for Sherborn to do much better would have involved the organization of
a systematic questionnaire, well beyond the energy and resources of a single elderly
worker (Dickinson 2016, Evenhuis 2016, Shindler 2016, Welter-Schultes et al. 2016).
Moreover, such a questionnaire would have been pointless even if Sherborn could ob-
tain major institutional support. Too many potential target museums were disrupted
during the war, even if they did not end up being targets of another kind. Such col-
lections research is, in any case, decentralised by its nature, dealing with collections,
documents and archives in many places: far beyond Sherborn on his own in London.
It would not help that collections research is naturally more chaotic by nature than
Sherborn’s more familiar bibliographical-taxonomic work. A single collection can end
up in many places thanks to the vagaries of the owner’s swaps, gifts, sales, and bequests,
and then of the holding institutions. For instance, Sherborn (p. 97) failed to note that
a signicant part of the fossil collection of Charles Moore (1815–1881) at the Royal
Literary and Scientic Institution, Bath, had been transferred to Taunton by the hon-
orary curator Rev. H. H. Winwood (1830–1920) (Copp et al. 2000). (Sherborn also
stated that the collection at Bath was being cared for by Winwood in 1925: “not an
easy task for a man dead 4 years”, dryly noted Torrens 1975a, p. 113).
Figure 4. Diering treatments of omas Hawkins. A e original Sherborn entry in Where is the – Collection?
(p. 67) B e much more extensive entry in World Palaeontological Collections (Cleevely 1983, p. 147).
A
B
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
94
Some of Sherborn’s information, such as the story of Groom and Davies, plainly
came unattributably from colleagues, probably losing precision and introducing error
along the way, but with a core of truth, as is the way of oral history. is is perhaps
how he knew that A. M. B. Anderson of Brighton was in fact a later alias for Alex-
ander Montagu Browne (1837–1923), curator of the New Walk Museum, Leicester,
and a major gure in the history of British taxidermy (p. 7). Rather disappointingly,
however, Sherborn failed to conrm the oral tradition amongst successive Leicester
curators (including J. A. Cooper and M. Evans, pers. comm. 2014, and MAT) that
Montagu Browne was sacked for running a brothel round the corner from the mu-
seum; the actual, or at least ocial, reason was a disagreement with the museum com-
mittee over his curatorial training scheme, and perhaps also the museum’s moderni-
sation (McCann 1981, Morris 2010, pp. 339–342). Nevertheless the entry reminds
us that Sherborn’s book remains a worthwhile source today, so it is unfortunate that
neither the book, nor his biography by Norman (1944), are fully available on the
internet today. Might not one of the annotated copies of Sherborn's book at NHM
be made available on Biodiversity Heritage Library?
Despite its problems, Sherborn’s book was the only one of its kind, and a great
deal better than nothing. Most importantly of all, Sherborn and some (but not all) of
his contemporaries appreciated that his book was simply a starting point, an initial
stage towards something better, as implied by its publication with every other page left
blank. I now turn to the issue of its long–term inuence.
Sherborn’s successors: collections research
A key reason for the rise of the specialist Geological Curators Group (GCG) in Britain
and Ireland in the 1970s was the realisation that much needed to be done to improve
the quality of museum work in geology (Doughty 1999, Knell 2002). Much of the
Group’s attention was devoted to issues of collection care and usage, and specimen
conservation.
Survey work was done to nd which institutions housed geological material, and
the state of these collections and their usage. is work led to publications listing
these institutions and analysing the resulting data, notably the classic “State and Sta-
tus” survey conducted by Phil Doughty (1937–2013) (Doughty 1981, 1999, and
more recently Nudds 1999 and Fothergill 2005). Although not collections listings in
the Sherborn sense, they often gathered useful information of this kind. Other im-
portant examples more globally are Glenister et al. (1977), Prieur (1980), and Webby
(1989, 1992).
Under the inuence and example of such workers as Hugh Torrens, GCG encour-
aged research on the history of collections, for it was realised that this had to be under-
stood before a collection could be properly curated and used (Doughty 1984, 1992,
1999, Knell 2002). Such work by Group members and others elucidated, amongst
other things, the fates and present locations of collections, and eectively followed
Where is the damned collection? 95
on from Sherborn. Some of this research was published as books, such as that which
Andrews (1982) wrote specically to locate certain fossil sh specimens published by
Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). But a signicant proportion appeared in the Newsletter
of the Geological Curators Group, latterly titled e Geological Curator. is was, and
remains, a collective work in progress, with the “Lost and Found” column providing
for collections inquiries and for short pieces on new information that does not justify
a whole article. is corpus is now available on www.geocurator.org.
Parallel developments took place for biological collections under the aegis of the Bi-
ology Curators Group, with its own journals such as the Biology Curators Group News-
letter. e Group is now part of the Natural Science Collections Association (NatSCA;
an increasing proportion of the older publications are accessible on www.natsca.org).
Sherborn’s successors: collections reference books
Ron Cleevely of the British Museum became interested in gathering information on
collections in the early 1970s, with the intent of producing a new revision of Sher-
born’s book, stemming originally from the need to locate type material to support the
work of Leslie R. Cox (1897–1965) for the Treatise of Invertebrate Palaeontology, and
using the data in an annotated copy of Sherborn’s book in the Fossil Mollusca Section.
Cleevely developed the book using links with the Society for the Bibliography of Natu-
ral History, and with the then new Geological Curators’ Group, including survey data
from Doughty’s ‘State and Status’ work and an earlier survey by Douglas Bassett of the
National Museum of Wales in 1966–1967 (Anon. 1972, Torrens 1974, Cleevely 1977,
1983, especially introductory essays, Hancock and Pettitt 1981, Pettitt and Hancock
1981, R. J. Cleevely, pers. comm. 2014). Fortunately the Museum’s management rec-
ognised the value of this project and Cleevely was able to spend ocial time on it. He
had originally simply intended a more modern version of Sherborn’s eort, and, like it,
inexpensive with alternate blank pages. However, its formal adoption by the Museum,
and a management decision, led to its publication as a markedly more substantial and
more expensive project.
Cleevely’s book World Palaeontological Collections provided far more detail than
Sherborn, and on many more collections (Cleevely 1983). It systematically incorporat-
ed references to collectors’ obituaries and biographies, museum catalogues, and other
useful sources (Figure 4). As a result, it is also a very useful biographical reference. It
is also much better organised, with indexation by institution and not just collector.
Cleevely’s book is not a strict equivalent to Sherborn’s, as he had to restrict his main
scope to fossils for reasons of project size (the unused information, mainly on zoologi-
cal collections, remains on le at NHM). But he did not rigidly exclude minerals, mol-
luscs and other non-fossils if they were relevant, as in the case of a multidisciplinary
collector. In origin, spirit and at least partly in coverage, Cleevely’s book is the most
direct successor to Sherborn’s. It remains very valuable today, and Doughty (1999)
regarded it as notably “worthy of revision”.
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
96
Cleevely’s work was preceded, and has been followed by, books listing collections
in other natural sciences. Peter Dance’s classic history of shell collecting listed scienti-
cally important collections of Recent shells as an appendix (1966; the 1986 edition
appears to have the same appendices though the main text is dierent). is listing
is now largely superseded by Kabat and Boss (1992). Dance (1966: 275, 1986: 201)
specically cited Sherborn’s book as an “extremely useful” predecessor, greatly helping
specialists locate important collections. Dance described his own list as containing a
fraction of those collections that had existed, and he usually omitted fossil molluscs,
but he recorded collections that had been destroyed during the Second World War.
Sherborn’s book listed auction sales, and another direct successor is therefore Nat-
ural history auctions 1700-1972: register of sales in the British Isles (Chalmers-Hunt et
al. 1976). is remains a valuable reference today. “[A]mong bibliographical aids to
[its] compilation [...] rst and foremost” was Sherborn’s book, both in itself and in an
extensively annotated copy in the British Museum (Natural History) (Chalmers-Hunt
et al. 1976, pp. ix–x).
Knowing about collections is not just of research value. Area Museum Councils,
now mostly abolished in the United Kingdom, were non-governmental public agen-
cies which provided support for, and directed resources to, museums not otherwise
funded by central government. During the 1980s, several Area Museum Councils set
up advisory schemes to support museums with “orphaned” geological collections, us-
ing specialist curatorial and conservation sta, sometimes from larger local museums.
is work was in direct response to the depressing results of the GCG’s “State and
Status” survey of collections (Doughty 1981, 1999, Taylor 1987, Knell and Taylor
1990). (e same issues, and parallel developments, occurred for biological collec-
tions.) An “orphaned” geological collection is one in a museum without specialist
geological or natural sciences sta. e persons managing the museum cannot make
decisions about the collection, let alone spend resources on it, if they know nothing
about it. During the middle decades of the 20th century it was common for a member
of sta from a larger institution to remove the scientically interesting material from
an orphan collection, sometimes abandoning or even dumping the remainder. Adviso-
ry schemes provided an informed alternative (Knell 1986, Gill and Knell 1988, Knell
and Taylor 1990). Non-geological management might still nd it hard to understand
the scientic importance of their collection, even with specialist advice, but they would
have no trouble appreciating its value for public display, and would also grasp the con-
cept of the wider historical and local signicance of a collection. However, they needed
information and advice to full the collection’s potential. e advisors’ reports, often
drawing upon collections research publications such as Cleevely’s book, helped justify
expenditure on those collections’ preservation and use. ey also raised the regard in
which the collections were held, and encouraged the assignment of permanent and
temporary sta (e. g. Taylor 1987, Torrens and Taylor 1990, Copp et al. 2000). All
those gave geological collections a greater chance to survive in a world where once they
had been discarded with impunity.
Where is the damned collection? 97
Sherborn’s successors: the Collections Research Units, FENSCORE, and
other online sources
Where is the – Collection? was specically recognised as a direct predecessor to the
Collections Research Units which were organised in the UK during the 1970s and
1980s (Pettitt and Hancock 1981, p. 73). ese units stemmed from the push for
collections information embodied by the Geological Curators Group and the Biology
Curators Group. ese Groups’ joint conference with the Systematics Association in
Liverpool in 1977, on the “Function of local natural history collections”, led directly
to the rst scheme, in north-west England, and then to others elsewhere (Hancock
and Pettitt 1981, Pettitt and Hancock 1981, Davis and Brewer 1986, Hartley et
al. 1987, Stace et al. 1987, especially vi-x, Bateman and McKenna 1993, Muse-
um Documentation Association 1993, Walley 1993, Doughty 1999, Hancock and
Hounsome 2010). e Units were usually based in major museums, using the sup-
port and regional structure of the Area Museum Councils, and often with additional
aid from the government job creation schemes of the time, and from funding bod-
ies such as the Wolfson Foundation. ey gathered information on geological and
biological collections, mostly in museums and other institutions such as schools and
universities, but sometimes held by individuals. Under the inuence, in particular, of
Bill Pettitt (1937–2009) of Manchester Museum (Hancock and Hounsome 2010),
those projects were seen as suitable for computerised data handling. Such modern
techniques were also seen as raising the perceived status of natural science curators
and helping the survival of their specialist positions. e processed output typically
summarised the collector, content, and source localities for each collection, in thick
volumes supplemented sometimes by microches for the bulk of the detail, as in the
Scottish volume (Stace et al. 1987). However, before the entire United Kingdom
was covered, these books came to be complemented by an online computer database
under the aegis of FENSCORE (Federation for Natural Sciences Collections Record-
ing), founded in 1981 but now dormant. e database is hosted by the University of
Manchester (www.fenscore.man.ac.uk). It is understood to contain the data from all
regions, including those (such as the South West) for which no book was ever pub-
lished. It can be searched in dierent ways from the books. is is a valuable resource,
which Doughty (1999) reckoned had basic information on over 95% of the natural
sciences contents of museums in the United Kingdom. It does not, however, include
the Natural History Museum collections (unless mentioned in some other entry as
an “Associated Name”).
is collections research work also fed biological and geological site and locality
data into the new county or regional environmental records centres, often based in
museums. is work was valuable in itself. It was also useful in gathering political sup-
port for those museums which were seen to be responding to the new environmental
concerns, and also to be playing their part in job creation schemes at a time when
unemployment was a major concern (Ely 1994).
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
98
The future
ere seems little immediate prospect of future updates to Sherborn’s successors, or
at least those dealing with collections in the United Kingdom. One reason must be
the pressure on museum stang levels, combined with the structural changes within
museum organizations which have led to a disproportionate reduction in specialist cu-
ratorial stang over the last two or three decades. All this, combined with the elimina-
tion of some Area Museum Councils, inevitably discourages joint curatorial projects,
whether between the museums of an area, or by the members of a specialist curatorial
group in their own time. Maybe the existing databases are simply seen as suciently
satisfactory that the further work needed for completion and updating is hard to justify
against other pressures and priorities. Perhaps, also, collections research is no longer
novel and fashionable, and has to some extent been displaced by newer initiatives
relating to such things as social inclusion, health and wellbeing, and communities.
New databases seem more likely to be at the specimen rather than collections level, be
intended for taxonomic use, and be accessible online. At least initially, too, they seem
likely to be at the level of the individual institution, such as the PalaeoSaurus database
operated by the British Geological Survey (BGS: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/palaeosaurus/).
However, the obvious need for cross-institutional platforms is leading to joint initia-
tives, if so far still specimen-based ones, such as the JISC-funded and BGS-led GB3D
types online project, a database of British type fossils, with high-resolution images, ste-
reo-anaglyphs and three-dimensional digital scans (http://www.3d-fossils.ac.uk/home.
html). So perhaps we will see the fruition of the early hopes of the Collections Research
Units workers for a union catalogue of type specimens (Hancock and Pettitt 1981, Pet-
titt and Hancock 1981).
Condentiality has always had to be taken into account (e. g. Bateman and Mc-
Kenna 1993), but a new problem arises because of legislation (at least in the UK)
concerning the condentiality of personal data on computer databases. is can cause
problems where the original collector’s name is part of the data sought by the inquirer.
e BGS have had to consider this issue for their databases (M. Howe, pers. comm.
2014). PalaeoSaurus compromises by omitting the donor/collector name from the
online display, but one can still search by using the collector name; and more recently
donors have been asked to give permission for their names to be put online. In my
view, there seems a strong argument for the default position to be the routine publica-
tion of names, with them being taken down if requested. e names of collectors and
donors can be critical for research, and requests not to publish names are rare or non-
existent, while names were routinely published in print in the days when museums still
produced full annual reports.
As far as the eld as a whole is concerned, one obvious way forward would be
a regularly updated digital version of Cleevely’s book, and its equivalents for other
elds, perhaps online and presumably incorporating information from FENSCORE.
Until then, it seems likely that as far as overall databases are concerned, we will have
to rely on Sherborn’s rst-generation successors, not forgetting Sherborn himself, and
Where is the damned collection? 99
(for the UK) FENSCORE, with internet and literature searches to catch more recent
publications. FENSCORE, at least, might perhaps be modernised by converting the
data into a modern system of data management, which could be updated directly by
curators allowed password access (G. Hancock, pers. comm. 2014). is reminds us
of the increasing importance of on-line sources, of which an example is the web pub-
lication 2,400 Years of Malacology by Eugene V. Coan, Alan R. Kabat and Richard
E. Petit (http://www.malacological.org/2004_malacology.html). It lists papers about
malacologists, such as biographies, bibliographies, and lists of taxa and their present
status, often noting the present repositories of relevant type specimens. Most impor-
tantly, like other on-line resources, this can be relatively easily updated, as happens
near the beginning of each calendar year (E. Coan, pers. comm. 2014).
Some museums also contain historical accounts and other information on their
websites, but those sites have a primary role in marketing, education and public pres-
entation, and are liable to radical modication thanks to marketing-driven changes. It
is prudent to keep such academic information in an explicitly permanent area, perhaps
best of all in a completely separate formal repository.
Conclusions
Guides such as Sherborn’s are needed more than ever, with the great increase in our
knowledge of collections and their fates, and their usage in research and education.
See, for instance, the essays by Cleevely (1983) and Doughty (1984, 1992), and the
comments above on orphaned collections. Here are, briey, a few further case studies.
A biologist or palaeontologist may only be concerned with individual specimens of
a single taxon, and which institution holds them. But to nd those specimens needs a
knowledge of collections, the intermediate level between specimen and museum, and
also how to use evidence such as specimen labels and catalogues. Such work led to the
location of the lost holotype of the ammonite Ammonites defossus Simpson, 1843, at the
Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge, informing a decision of the International Commission
of Zoological Nomenclature (Torrens 1979, Forbes 1980, Brunton et al. 1985).
It can be important to nd the institutions holding a named collection. A researcher
on the Wealden fossil reptiles of the dinosaur pioneer Gideon Mantell (1790–1852)
could nd it valuable to know the museums to which his collection was partly dispersed
by the British Museum in the late 1880s (Cleevely and Chapman 1992, p. 354).
ere are other reasons to be aware of collections as entities in their own right.
e documentation of collections, in the widest sense, includes diaries, eld notes and
correspondence. When a collection is split between museums, one institution is likely
to end up holding data relevant to specimens in another institution. An example is the
Alfred Leeds (1847–1917) collection of Middle Jurassic fossil vertebrates from Peter-
borough, England, divided between museums in dierent countries (Liston and Noè
2004, Araújo et al. 2008, Noè et al. 2010). A knowledge of the collection in question
can suggest other important issues; for instance, a researcher using the Jurassic marine
Michael A. Taylor / ZooKeys 550: 83–106 (2016)
100
reptiles collected by omas Hawkins (1810–1889) needs to know that these contain
a number of deceptively fabricated composites (Lomax and Massare 2012).
Finally, the creation and use of collections is a major subject of research in its own
right, which addresses important questions in the sociology and history of science,
and in wider Western culture. A good example is the work of Simon Knell (2000) on
early 19th century English geology, which was inspired by Hugh Torrens's biographical
studies of an underclass of practical men and women. Torrens (1995) has argued that
historians must remember that making a collection can itself be a major contribution
to a eld of study, even if the collector produces no publications (see also Doughty
1992, pp. 518–519). Such a person was Mary Anning (1799–1847), commercial col-
lector of Lyme Regis. Remarkably, she has attracted more biographical attention than
almost all British or Irish geologists (Oldroyd 2013). is admittedly arises partly be-
cause of her story as a poor working class woman in a romantic Regency resort, but the
excitement of fossil collecting is an important element in her appeal: hence the stream
of popular Anningian books and articles, and museum activities such as those at the
Natural History Museum, London, and Lyme Regis Museum. All this is, of course,
based in part on Torrens’s research (1995), reminding us that collections research has
an important role in public education and recreation. Anning is admittedly an ironic
example, for we would probably know more about her if Sherborn had not dispersed,
and, one presumes, also partly destroyed much of her personal archive as valueless for
scientic research. is came about because her papers had been handed to Richard
Owen (1804–1892), latterly Director of the British Museum (Natural History), and
thereby passed to Sherborn who was given the huge and problematical task of dealing
with Owen’s papers (Gruber and ackray 1992, Torrens 1995). is explains what
happened when the American palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984),
visiting the British Museum in 1926–1927 to work on Mesozoic mammals, was be-
friended by Sherborn. Sherborn gave him “some treasures, an ms & autograph letter of
Owen’s, [and] a sheaf of notes in Clift’s hand on the famous ‘Missourium’” – William
Clift (1775–1849) being Owen’s father-in-law and predecessor as Conservator at the
Hunterian Museum (Laporte 1987, p. 62). is attitude of Sherborn’s must have con-
tributed to the historiographic problems which today beset any writer trying to make
sense of what has been written about Anning while paying due respect to elementary
accuracy at any level (Torrens 1995, Taylor and Torrens 2014 and refs therein).
A knowledge of collections is, in short, useful for curation and research, and in
developing the managerial and political will to support those collections and their mu-
seums. But this requires the underpinning of a corpus of organised information about
the collections, and this is what Sherborn pioneered, as Nature’s reviewer instantly
realised (Ritchie 1940, p. 80):
[e book’s] deciencies can be put right in time; the chief concern is that
Dr. Sherborn’s vast knowledge and painstaking labour have created a foundation
upon which a complete Catalogus esaurorum [i.e. Catalogue of Collections]
may be erected, and which in the meantime will be invaluable for reference.
Where is the damned collection? 101
For its defects, Sherborn’s book was more than useful enough to show the value of
such works, while its inadequacies repeatedly reminded the user that something better
was not only possible, but must be done. e seed which he planted did indeed take
root and grow. How it will develop in the future is, perhaps, another matter.
Acknowledgements
Simon Knell, like me a peripatetic advisory curator during the 1980s, kindly discussed
the questions raised by Sherborn’s often overlooked work. Our mutual reections make
it timely to acknowledge the debt that our generation of curators owes to Hugh Tor-
rens, Ron Cleevely and the late Phil Doughty, and the other founders of the Geological
Curators Group, and their fellow pioneers in the Biology Curators Group. eir work
led natural science curators to rethink our relationship to our collections, with a great
impact on the values which we sought to pursue in our profession.
I am most grateful to the referees, Ron Cleevely, Eugene Coan, Paul Martyn Cooper
and Alan R. Kabat for their helpful reviews and information. I also thank John Cooper,
Mark Evans, David Gelsthorpe, Geo Hancock, Mike Howe, Andrew Kitchener, Mark
Shaw, and Hugh Torrens for discussion and information. I thank Rosalind Grooms,
Cambridge University Press Archivist, Cambridge University Library, for searching for
and providing copies of archival material in CUL, and Katherine ompson, Brand
Protection Ocer, CUP, for locating the publication contract and providing a copy.
e Cambridge University Library and Cambridge University Press are thanked for
permission to cite archival material. I am grateful for the support of the libraries of the
University of Leicester and National Museums Scotland and to the Natural History
Museum Image Library for copies of books and documents illustrating this paper.
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