'A Paradise and Cabinet of Rarities'

Among my sub-specialties as a newspaper reporter was writing profiles of people who collected things. I collected collectors, including men and women (predominantly men) who sought every variety of the world's sand, bowling alley memorabilia, wood samples from every species of tree, the coins and currency issued by leper colonies and, of course, beer cans. All showed a propensity for taxonomy, organizing their collections according to arcane theories of genus and species. It’s stupid and self-righteous to dismiss such people in glibly Freudian terms as anal retentive. My impression was that they cared deeply for something. They were enthusiasts and, in a sense, were celebrating the bounty of creation. In general, they were happy people who enjoyed showing others their collections.

 

John Evelyn (1620-1706), the renowned gardener and founding Fellow of the Royal Society, for sixty-six years kept a diary, published posthumously in 1818. Its six volumes contain more than half a million words, and I’m reading a selection. In the entry for October 16, 1671, Evelyn describes his “desire to see that famous scholar and physician, Dr. T[homas] Browne, author of the Religio Medici and Vulgar Errors, now lately knighted.” He continues:

 

“Next morning, I went to see Sir Thomas Browne . . . ; his whole house and garden being a paradise and cabinet of rarities; and that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants, and natural things. Among other curiosities, Sir Thomas had a collection of the eggs of all the fowl and birds he could procure, that country (especially the promontory of Norfolk) being frequented, as he said, by several kinds which seldom or never go further into the land, as cranes, storks, eagles, and variety of water fowl.”

 

I admire few writers of prose more than Browne. His writing is a form of collecting – words, ideas, scraps of knowledge – but I confess the collecting of birds’ eggs disturbs my twenty-first-century sensibilities (I don’t even eat eggs). It comes to seem like needless slaughter, an act not unlike abortion, especially today with all the other threats – loss of habitat, pesticides, etc. -- facing wildlife. I collected butterflies as a boy, which entailed netting, killing and mounting specimens. Nigel Andrew recounts his own evolving reaction to butterfly collecting in his marvelous  book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband, 2025). According to the website of the American Ornithological Society:

 

“Egg collecting, or öology as it was once known, became illegal in the UK in 1954, and collectors have since been excoriated to such an extent than even the sight of a clutch of eggs in a museum can trigger an indignant outburst.”