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postal system meant that naturalists from different classes could correspond
and exchange specimens without coming face to face (Barber 1980: 31–9).
In Britain and North America, the popular passion for natural history sup-
plied museums with an audience and with specimens, while larger animals were
supplied by the hunter naturalists who killed big game in Britain’s colonies and
in the North American wilderness. As in Britain, early nineteenth-century
natural history in the United States was relatively inclusive. Naturalists believed
they were engaged in a devout and democratic pursuit. The members of the
Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812, included eminent
scientists alongside working men and women (membership was predominantly
male). Charles Willson Peale, who founded his private museum of ‘natural
curiosities’ in the late eighteenth century, promoted his museum as being of use
to a wide cross-section of society including farmers, merchants and mechanics
(Conn 1998: 35–7).
The first major natural history museums saw themselves as places for
research and study. Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion (which opened in 1846), described the collections as ‘the rough material
from which science is to be evolved’ (Henry cited in Wonders 1993: 108). The
Philadelphia Society’s museum, which opened in 1826, had object-based
research as the primary purpose of its displays (Conn 1998: 38). Louis Agassiz,
the founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University
saw the museum’s purpose as furthering scientific education by facilitating
the study of specimens (Wonders 1993: 108). These figures did not so much
favour scientific research over education, as see research as education. This
model was swiftly being overtaken by another, which viewed education as
the dissemination of already-formed facts and ideas to as large a public as
possible. In the 1870s, William Ruschenberger, president of the Philadelphia
Academy of Natural Sciences, campaigned against efforts to market the
museum in the same ways as department stores, and to emphasize entertain-
ment and exhibition over research (Conn 1998: 40, 58). The increasing pressure
to turn museums into sites of mass popular appeal was at the expense of the
notion of the museum as a research institution for everyone.
The museum which most epitomized the new vision was the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. Founded in 1868 as ‘a democratic
institution dedicated to popular education in the natural sciences’, it was entire-
ly financially dependent on its trustees. These were wealthy businessmen who
favoured ‘naked eye science’ and supported the branches of natural history with
the largest and most impressive specimens (Wonders 1993: 109). While some
museum men held on to the importance of distancing the museum from popu-
lar entertainments, the AMNH wholeheartedly embraced popular techniques
of display – most obviously in the form of the diorama. Frank M. Chapman,