© Simon Knell, all rights reserved. From Simon Knell, Immortal remains: fossil collections from the heroic age of geology (1820-1850), Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, UK, 1997.
This thesis arose out of an interest not in history but in existing palaeontological collections. Many of these have been derived from what geologists and historians romantically refer to as the heroic age of geology.[1] In the late twentieth century these collections have two dominant attributes: they are difficult to relate to their past (all have been through extended periods of neglect and disorder) and they hold a paucity of data (apparently due to the lower requirements of the science which generated them). They have come down to us over a period of nearly two hundred years and relate directly to the science’s golden age yet they appear to be neither particularly illuminating historical documents nor, it would seem, materials ideally suited to supporting the objectives of modern science. Research here has aimed at understanding the processes which led to the formation of these collections and their relationship to the needs of science in that period.
First, it is necessary to put to rest any notion that the inadequacies of these collections are simply the product of the immaturity of contemporary science. The most remarkable attribute of geology at this time was the rapidity with which it acquired rigour and sophistication. Romanticism was rapidly swept aside to reveal a science rooted in fact and objectivity which soon evolved advanced theoretical and conceptual ideas. A perfect example of this is seen in the Geological Survey’s vision of rocks as the embodiment of transient environments – the ‘bald and trifling’ paradigm of Smith transposed into an integrated model of the changing surface of the Earth. This period also saw collecting shift from antiquarian curiosity, to illustration and the preservation of vouchers; from fact gathering networks to theory driven research. This was, however, not a uniform transition across society: in some locations and sectors naive science would survive; elsewhere geology would take on a modern perspective before the end of the first decade. Collections have preserved these changing perceptions of the role of fossils in science, but we should not be mistaken into perceiving them as simply the product of early scientific endeavour.
From the beginning fossil collecting was delegated; undertaken by individuals with few scientific credentials. This view contradicts that of William Williamson who in the 1860s told Phillips ‘fossil hunting is now-a-daysdone by deputy’, suggesting that this had not been the case in his father’s time.[2] In reality Williamson was not perceiving a shift in science but of his position within it. John Williamson was merely ‘a deputy’.
Williamson was perhaps thinking of the type of employee Thomas Wilson of the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society engaged in 1841: ‘a young man to collect fossils for the museum at a rate of 21s per week for himself, and his expenses’.[3] In a more sophisticated way this was how the Geological Survey collected fossils, and how the Yorkshire philosophers utilised the fossil market. The collector in all his or her guises, and regardless of social station, became a deputy, subservient to those, such as Smith and Phillips, who pursued science. The true rewards of science were for those who could construct arguments from these raw materials.
These deputies – fossil collectors, dealers and donors – set their own objectives; objectives which were often in stark contrast to those of the men who exploited the resulting collections for science. Sometimes they delegated others to do the field collecting. Field collectors,[4] were generally incapable of extracting intrinsic field data – they were not at the forefront of science and had no way of knowing what its requirements were. How could such a collector, for example, guess at the questions Phillips sought to resolve by the investigation of Bielsbeck and which he communicated to Dikes in 1829? Obviously, there was some variation here; the data collected by Dunn or John Williamson was in advance of that of the coastal artisans.
These labouring artisans were of key importance to fossil collecting but they were generally ignorant of the value of the fossils which they might find in road building, quarrying or agriculture. Evidence for the destruction of important finds due to this failure to educate the manual worker is considerable. As the landed and professional classes became aware of the possibilities for discovery from itinerant lecturers, a university education or magazines and newspapers, so labourers were briefed, but they would rarely be able to adopt sophisticated lines of enquiry. Their role would simply be to find and supply. Along the Whitby coast, during the 1840s, this would become a burgeoning and profitable sideline for jet collectors and alum workers. Field collecting would in large part remain in the hands of those who had the advantage of location or occupation to find fossils, but who had no interest in science or for whom field data had commercial value.
…correct information of the commonest, as well as the rarest, of their parts will be best obtained by those who make it their endeavour to collect specimens. Now, the persons who do so are generally those of no great abilities, yet have a taste for the pursuit, which the profit arising from it enhances. This profit is derived from supplying those who desire to possess, without the trouble of collecting, as well as those whose study is directing to the theoretical and physiological part. Hence we see the majority of books, published for the extension of these studies, are in error in many parts, for the want of that information which only the practical pursuit of them can give. Thus, those who publish apply for guidance to those who collect; but the pecuniary advantage they derive from secrecy on this point, leads them to give wrong dates and circumstances.[5]
Thus, immediately fossils were disinterred they became deprived of their most fundamental data attributes. The situation would not improve even in the hands of those who assembled collections.[6] Phillips was, for example, very wary of the information held in cabinets knowing that much of this may have been inferred by less qualified men than himself.
There were also many collectors who took a greater intellectual interest in fossils. Men such as John Dunn, John Williamson and William Bean, for example, were each searching for species against a new stratigraphic framework. It could be argued that they were scientifically motivated. But was this simple fact-collecting science? They were doing no more than proving the presence or absence of species. Phillips inferred, in 1836, that such fact-collecting produced no more than a particular kind of primary evidence complementary to that visible in the field.[7] The intellectual processes of the collector could be ignored. By this process collecting had the apparent objectivity of inductivism – it was untainted by scientific theory. However, the ulterior social motives of the collector counter any such claims. Vernon and Phillips equally displayed a lack of truly inductive method; they instead pursued science with realistic objectivity. The investigation of Bielsbeck, for example, was driven by contemporary theory and debate. Collecting sought to answer specific questions.
Occasionally, collectors would present their discoveries to wider audiences in publication. This was an attempt at making science of what they had but most of these were little more than simple expositions of the peculiar connoisseurship skills of the collector. In addition they viewed public exhibition as a form of scientific publication, and were encouraged to do so by the science’s elite.[8] Phillips certainly saw this as an object as worthy as that of publication; but his emphasis was on the intellectual processes such collections could represent when properly organised and illustrated by maps and sections. The collector believed that simply opening his doors to the public to reveal the very old, the rare, the beautiful and the spectacular fulfilled the same purpose. In reality, Phillips’ idea of exhibition was scientific exposition; Bean’s exhibition – like indeed that of the Whitby society – had more in common with a promotional tourist guide. Yet science would respect these more primitive exhibitions; expectations of exhibitions were probably always low as few museums had the resources necessary to create and maintain them – word of mouth interpretation remained dominant. Science could understand these materials without the need for interpretation and the notion that collectors were achieving a level of publication would do much to engender their support. If science wished to utilise these raw materials then it would need to make the collector feel that theirs was an important and noble occupation.
This gentlemanly nurturing of collectors can be seen in other ways too. They were patronised by superlatives, honorary titles and the use of the collector’s manuscript names in publication. Phillips himself exposes this system of chivalry which linked science to the collector. Usually exceptionally diplomatic, he was perhaps less adept at patronising collectors than some of his contemporaries like James Sowerby; he had come from a stratum of society more likely to be patronised than to give patronage. Consequently, he did the unthinkable in not crediting collectors in his first book, and even included veiled criticism of them in his second. A dangerous path, as collectors were not without power, as Dunn reminded Phillips: ‘They have the right of property and can instantly obtain the fulfilness of such wishes by sending their specimens to London or Paris’.
Under the guidance of Smith and Phillips local collections improved in scientific content. Earlier collections were based on half truths and speculation; before the mid to late 1820s they could neither be identified nor stratigraphically localised.[9] Many rocks were deemed unworthy of investigation in the expectation that they were barren. Smith and Phillips could only make sense of these collections by interpolation or inference. To most enquirers, and to the individuals who created them, they embodied little in the way of knowledge other than that acceptable to the connoisseur or which might be drawn from sister sciences such as anatomy. The methodology of the itinerant lecturers implanted objectives into local collecting activity and a means to generate collections of practical worth based on an emerging universal geological language. Certainly, Dunn, Williamson, Bean, and others in Scarborough, became enthralled by geology, or at least the fossil hunting it encouraged, and while it is difficult to call their activities science their new sport was more than a pleasurable way to utilise leisure hours or a manifestation of Sheppard’s collecting mania.
Beneath the facade of science, fossil collections became material representations of social ambition. As the discoveries of the early 1820s revealed the potential of a previously invisible element in the British landscape, so fossils became a new natural resource. Not one to feed furnaces or generate capital but one capable of contributing to the higher ideals of knowledge and understanding. An underclass might also seek to derive financial benefits (indeed all collections represented investments) but for most social acclaim was more important.
The collector in supporting science often projected an image of an individual in pursuit of knowledge but rather than ‘to know’ the collector’s true motive was ‘to be’.[10] Indeed ‘to know’, even in the simplistic fashion of a connoisseur, was, within the undeveloped system of geological knowledge prevalent in provincial England in the 1820s, a means to achieve status, that is ‘to be’. An examination of the progress of early professional curators shows that society was barely ready for men who wished to rise on merit alone, but the reputation one might acquire from the supposedly scientific occupation of fossil collecting could contribute significantly to one’s social standing. Social standing was everything; fame could go some way to compensating for lowly birth. In Cayley’s eyes reputation was a material possession: ‘a man’s fair fame ought to be as much as his own estate’. Society was infatuated with individual rank and ‘social expectation’. As Young and Ripley insolently reminded Clark ‘we must not forget the position which we hold in Society as gentlemen and men of honour’. In early nineteenth century society there could be no greater insult.
Britain’s geology became the ‘epitome of the globe’; the local philosopher could make discoveries as remarkable as those reported from the far corners of the Empire from his own armchair. For the collector, fame need not arise from the arduous journey to higher learning; the vast majority of those he wished to impress had no knowledge of science or where its achievements really lay. The collector’s reputation would be built on the process of discovery, possession or supply. As David Williams of Bleadon put it:
In my geological researches my only object is to accumulate materials for ‘some wise master builder’ hereafter to use in the structure of an edifice of Truth that shall be immortal – when once this is effected I am sure that by the wise and the good the labourer will also be remembered.[11]
If collections carried social ambitions then they would inevitably create rivalries. The rivalry between Bean and Williamson, for example, is a manifestation of this. It had little to do with science or acquisitiveness; Bean simply relished his position as ‘Columbus’. Dunn, likewise, saw the smallest discovery as capable of raising his name to fame: ‘It is but fair that those who first find should have the benefit of their discoveries’. But even men of elevated status such as Roderick Murchison ruthlessly sought fame. Again, they strived to establish their own monuments – but in this case conceptual ones. He defended his Silurian System as his own offspring and in so doing created one of the greatest conceptual monuments of the age. With Phillips he battled over the possession of ‘Palaeozoic’; though here Phillips won.
Mantell remarked: ‘Murchison is too omnivorous of fame, grasping at what does not belong to him’,[12] a statement which underlines not simply this striving for fame but more significantly its universality; Mantell did not so much condemn Murchison’s fame seeking as complained of him usurping the monuments of others. De la Beche, Cumberland and others saw this ubiquitous pursuit of fame as a plague on science. ‘To advance science we must all men to work from all sorts of motives, but “every gentleman for his peculiar fame” is sad work’.
This preoccupation with monument building proved an important force in motivating enquiry, it was also a symptom of a society and its relationship with death.[13] The prospect of death was ever present; for the majority of the population life was short and its end unpredictable. As the lives of Smith and Phillips showed, both parents and children died young. Thus Phillips made preparations for Smith’s demise by sorting out materials for a memoir, which he ultimately published, and encouraged his uncle to provide information to contribute to a publication which would be ‘the keystone’ to his ‘future reputation’. The objective was to preserve his memory and his achievements. Such memoirs were commonplace; eulogy an expectation after death,[14] even if such enterprises held motives as superficial as the formal mourning Phillips observed at Helmsley.
Collections had a permanence which served the same purpose. Thus of Edward Sanderson George, who died at the tragically young age of 29, ‘The Philosophical Hall, in Leeds, exhibits many memorials of his knowledge in geology, ornithology and other departments of science’.[15] Fossil collections were to become ‘fragile monuments’; the immortal remains of one life gathered together to immortalise another’s.
In the same way local philosophers created monuments to their time, which would preserve their achievements ‘in future ages’, just as De la Beche was to be immortalised by the institutions he created: ‘you will hammer out for yourself a monument of fitting dimensions’ Phillips had told him. John Phillips also confided to De la Beche that he wished to ‘be remembered among the Geologists of this age’; he did not phrase these aspirations in terms of contemporary recognition. Even before he had any reputation of which to speak he recognised the need to establish more than a ‘pail memorial’: ‘I may be for some time remembered – my place may remain for some time vacant’. His memorials were to be literary achievements – ‘perennial volumes’ which would preserve his name into the future.
This process of immortalisation would begin even within the lives of society’s heroes; hero creation was also a matter of national pride. Phillips, for example, found himself being profiled for a series entitled ‘Eminent Living Geologists’ in the Geological Magazine in the latter years of his life and interviewed for the Athenaeum. When he died, he received the York equivalent of a state funeral. In the second half of the century communities indulged in reminiscence, publishing volumes eulogising local ‘worthies’ of the past. The Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society, in 1882, decided to introduce a series of biographical sketches of eminent Yorkshire geologists into its proceedings. This included a celebration of Phillips but more significantly a profile of John Williamson.[16] It is interesting that Williamson survived as a notable Scarborough naturalist when the more eminent William Bean became erased from the history books – Bean is hardly mentioned in Baker’s History of Scarborough of the same year. At this time Williamson’s son, now an eminent Manchester professor, toured societies giving a retrospective view of the pioneering days of Scarborough geology, inadvertently placing his father, who had died not many years earlier, in high profile. Bean had no such champion.
Such actions created the romantic notion of an ‘heroic age’. Ultimately, many of these reputations had been built on fossils – even that of Phillips. Fossil collectors became the primary producers in the ecology of a science infatuated with glory.
As well as materials to be picked over by science and with which to build a lasting memorial, collections also played an important part in the fashion for geology during this period. Geology may have rapidly evolved to discuss quite intricate and esoteric points of stratigraphy and taxonomy but it still managed to maintain its popularity. This was, in part, possible because science was intricately entwined with its own material culture; it was still seeking its fundamental building blocks. Preoccupied with palaeontology and stratigraphy, fossils formed the most important of these components and the whole nation, it seemed, was encouraged to gather them up. Objectives such as these would clearly appeal to a society which turned beetle hunting into a national craze. In the process the material culture of science became the popular culture of society. Fossil collections became illustrations of newsworthy stories capable of supporting countless superlatives. Their merit was in their simplification of science enabling the digestion of its most remarkable facts without the need for detail or complex concepts. In many ways fossils simply needed to exist to underline the processes of discovery; the public required no more of them.
It would be wrong to assume that science alone was sufficient to generate this popularity even amongst the scientists themselves. As Fitton remarked to De la Beche in 1825, certain provisions were necessary at the Geological Society ‘to make the public reading of memoirs at all interesting’: discussion, large scale maps, diagrams and a tea party were vital.[17] The geologists’ keenness to debate, when taken into the public arena at the meetings of the British Association, drew huge crowds. Whilst some speakers were undoubtedly lively, few papers would convey much that was of such universal interest. The audience was drawn not by the intricacies of geology but to view the edges of civilised society laid ragged by controversy; the gossip and scandal of popular culture.
As the science developed its fundamental concepts so these were expressed in prose worthy of a good novel, in works such as Lyell’s Principles, De la Beche’s Manual, Phillips’ Guide and others. The content of these books also held considerable novelty and local monographs, like that by Phillips in 1829, brought into view an area of potential understanding that had previously been invisible. Like Lyell, Phillips’ great strength was not simply his ability to exploit and extend the discoveries of others but more importantly that he was an expert communicator. This was vital to popularity.
Amongst fashionable society geology acquired the cultural significance of classical art, romantic poetry, foreign language or astronomy, but through its willingness to expose its rivalries and develop its characters it was more socially interesting than any of these. Such high culture required appreciation, rather than high academic understanding, to be of social use. In these circles the arcane knowledge of the collector, which had its own internal consistency aimed at meeting the needs of collecting proficiency and rivalry but which only coincidentally would contain scientific ideas, made him a connoisseur. As the science progressed so it threw up a succession of localities, formations and species which became a trademark of connoisseurship and the language of a supposedly elevated mind. The second Marquis of Northampton[18] as President of the Royal Society threw lavish soirées at his London house which became the high spot in the social calendar. Here he not only displayed his aesthetically biased collection of minerals and fossils but also brought on Mantell and other collectors as entertainment. The ability of the collection to simplify and communicate, and yet be part of high culture, made it a particularly effective means with which to sell science to government and the crown. Representatives of both attended.
On a regional scale, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society constructed an institution which exploited these nuances of society, culture and ambition. Prestige pulled collections and allegiances into York. A brotherhood of shared ambition sought to elevate York above its neighbours; to assert its pre-eminent position within the county. The Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society on the other hand exerted a pull on fossils and supporters based on its ability to generate and support a market in fossils. Intercommunity and international rivalries, and civic pride, furthered this society bonding. Fossils became symbolic of status, particularly the rare, the spectacular, the finely preserved and the comprehensive series. Scarborough Literary and Philosophical Society appears to have felt little civic rivalry, having been born to a position of subservience; there was instead great competition within the town amongst its numerous collectors.
Each society had its own hinterland, over which it sought to have dominion. The York society wished to dominate the county and some of its most senior supporters were employed to try to make this so. Despite this Whitby rapidly gained control of the most important fossil collecting territory in northern Britain, knowing that only by this means could it establish a reputation; fossils took on a political aspect. The Scarborough society, which formed later, had little choice but to bow to the wishes of its larger neighbour. Beyond their ‘local’ hinterlands, societies attempted to collect representative selections of fossils from localities then making geological headlines. Such material would make a physical link between their often parochial interests and the wider world of science.
Societies told their supporters what needed to be collected, which ranged from specific instructions to search for species to more general wish lists. They had, however, no control over field rigour and relied for the majority of their collections on chance finds and ‘presents’ which held social rather than scientific intentions. Many of these would have already been through one or two pairs of hands before those of the donor. A dependence on donation meant that the society’s scientific ambitions would be built by those who through gift attempted to show their connoisseurship, intelligence, wealth, beneficence or simply to implant a personal memorial. The donor ultimately determined the direction in which an institution’s collections grew and as such these did not reflect the scientific intentions or achievements, if any, of that society.
In Whitby the collection was more fluid – philosophers could pick material from dealers and sell on the duplicates thus created. By offering a unique agency for the sale of fossils they surmounted the problem of these already having a commercial value. They were only able to do this because the local market was underdeveloped. By viewing everything collected locally they had the best possible opportunities to accumulate all that was rare or novel provided, of course, that they had the connoisseurship to detect such specimens.
At the heart of each society were a small group of men who would make what they would of what was given. In Whitby, this would largely be promotional activity; in York, Phillips and Vernon would attempt to create science. Again Phillips would need to rely upon his powers of interpolation – powers once used to establish new commercial territory were turned to building scientific knowledge. For the low resolution (though rigorous) stratigraphic studies of the 1820s, he found fossil collections a useful model for understanding field relations.
If collections were not exploited by an inner circle of provincial scientists they might be drawn into larger national works or attract the interest of a respected observer. Most specimens, however, would fail to gain scientific notice. Thus Whitby fossils were largely excluded from Conybeare’s research on marine reptiles, as were Sedgwick’s crocodile jaws and the eighteenth century crocodile skeleton lost somewhere in the British Museum. Similarly, York’s specimen of Didelphis played little part in the debate surrounding these fossils, replaced instead by Phillips’ drawing of it.
Amongst collectors motivation was directed towards a search for fossils most capable of extending the reputation of the connoisseur, which again meant the rare, the new, the well-preserved.[19] Such material was also important to science, but contrasted greatly with the fragmentary and sometimes common specimens gathered by Smith and Phillips in Scarborough, Phillips in Devon and Forbes in Ireland. Whether these latter fossils survive in museum collections seems unlikely. It is not so much that they were uncollectable but that they were not of cabinet quality or could later be replaced by better examples. Whilst contemporary scientists were aware of the omissions in collection building, there is little evidence that they sought to correct this in the collections themselves or make collections truly representative of scientific progress.
De la Beche’s Geological Survey would progressively change this fossil collecting model. Initially, in his investigation of the South West, he attempted to utilise that same network of locally based amateur collectors which elsewhere fed society aspirations and had long been the life blood of the embryonic science. This model sought to meet the needs of two disparate projects: Phillips’ catalogue of fossils aimed at resolving taxonomic inconsistencies and providing fossil evidence to assist in determining stratigraphic relations in the region. Unlike the philosophers, De la Beche could not call upon local allegiance, prestige or payment as rewards to draw collectors in. Instead he offered Phillips’ curatorial services. Other workers also sought to use these collections which, like collections elsewhere, began to take a political aspect and the rivalries associated with reputation building. Phillips had no alternative but to use these collections entirely inductively, leading to omission and the impossibility of placing them in a logical stratigraphic framework which depended so much on the observation of superimposition and field relations. Instead Phillips utilised geographical divisions but these concealed the hidden biases of individual collectors.
With the expansion of the Survey as it moved into South Wales, De la Beche was able to eradicate many of the weaknesses in this collecting model. Now fossil collecting would be integrated into the work of Survey staff, though still delegated to juniors. In this way he attempted to retain absolute control over the collection and dispersion of information including collected specimens. Such control was essential to improve field rigour in stratigraphy. But unlike the system of external collectors, his men could be trained, educated, nurtured and briefed, and they would pursue Survey objectives rather than their own. Collecting was also more even in its coverage of a region; individual collector biases were reduced. There were, however, problems in using these juniors. Phillips had shown in Devon and in South Wales that experience and a theoretical understanding of local geology could improve collecting efficiency. Initially, the Survey’s collectors lacked these skills, and would simply collect from sites recorded by more senior workers during the tracing of boundaries. Within a short time, however, several of the Survey’s collectors developed extraordinary abilities and the amateur’s role in stratigraphic geology was diminished. At this time the Survey’s objective was almost entirely stratigraphic.
This phase in the Survey’s activities produced prodigious amounts of material from what was largely virgin territory for the collector. It was to be used in statistical analysis but Phillips soon found such large collections far from useful, and they were omitted from review prior to publication. A final change in the Survey’s collecting model came with the establishment of its museum and its programme of publications. The Museum rapidly became seen as the national repository for fossils and collectors across the country made contact in the hope of making a sale. Many of these collections were gathered in. Equally Forbes’ palaeontological descriptions of fossils in the Survey’s Memoirs and in Organic Remains would utilise material from private collections. Well preserved examples of rare or new species were essential to these publications, and the role of the amateur in geology in this respect at least would be preserved. In a future post-Darwinian age, palaeontology would also recognise the need for increased stratigraphic rigour and the role of the amateur would be further sidelined in this aspect of the science also.
Through these decades the role of fossils in science seemed to be pulled between the needs of palaeontology and the needs of stratigraphy as the former became increasingly the preserve of the naturalist who introduced ideas from the study of extant faunas. By this process the division between the living and fossil worlds became blurred and the Survey’s collecting took on a motive aimed at answering environmental questions. This environmental perspective of fossils and rocks had been gaining ground since the mid 1820s. However, whilst these complex concepts were understood and developed by the Survey’s regional directors many of its collectors would continue to operate at a more primitive level receiving the fatherly nurturing prevalent in the philosophical era.
When Phillips contacted his collector friends in later life he found that many had disposed of their collections. The fashion for fossil collecting appears to have declined almost as rapidly as it had begun as the opportunities for local discovery waned, or attracted little scientific attention. Collectors may also have had difficulty competing with the large number of dealers which became involved in the trade, particularly on the Yorkshire coast, in the middle years of the century. In many regions what had once been virgin territory was rapidly depleted of fossils; William Williamson recalls this in later life, Bean and Dunn witnessed it within a few years of the discovery of fossil producing strata. Phillips had experienced the same phenomenon near Bath: ‘I know or knew every field for some miles thereabout, & have gathered many a fossil where none can be now had’.[20] The ‘collect everything’ mentality of the Geological Survey would have similar effect in Wales and the Malverns. The philosophical societies’ golden age was little more than a decade before initial enthusiasms were dissipated. Some, like the Whitby society, took advantage of the mid-century boom in Yorkshire coast fossils, but by then the philosophical age was over and new passions for natural history were emerging which sought to meet other social needs.
Fossil collections assembled during the years 1820 to 1850 remain the reference materials of science; the very foundations of palaeontology and stratigraphy. They also record the evolving methodologies of geology and reveal a society seeking fame and remembrance. Fossil collections are at once the material proofs of both life in another era and of the ‘truth’ of an heroic age.
[1] See for example, Porter (1978:817); Torrens (1990d); Morrell (1994).
[2] Williamson to Phillips, 8 November 1865, OUM 1865/220.
[3] Davis (1889:159). Thomas Wilson (26 September 1800 – 17 January 1876) was the mainstay of the Society, see Davis (1889:49-52) Morrell (1983; 1988b).
[4] I exclude here, those who collected but also pursued science such as Simpson.
[5] K (1825) discussing zoology; the situation in geology is further complicated by stratigraphy. He suggests that collectors should be given a medal to encourage them to reveal their data. In the late 1980s, the Geological Curators Group and the Palaeontological Association both considered doing just this to encourage more rigour in collecting.
[6] Museum workers and historians have used the ambiguous term ‘collector’ without distinction in the literature, though aware of dual roles. Purcell & Gould (1992) distinguish these roles as finders and keepers, remarking on the use of the latter term as an official museum designation in the UK; this terminology is repeated by Knell (1994b) who preferred the terms ‘field collector’ (finder) and ‘collection assembler’ (keeper). Torrens (1995) chose the anthropological terms ‘hunter’ and ‘gatherer’ which perhaps better capture the proactive nature of collecting revealed by research here and elsewhere.
[7] See Rudwick (1985:424) for a discussion of gradients of competence and their implications for the collector.
[8] Rudwick (1972:12) describes the fossil monograph as a collection in more convenient form.
[9] Torrens (1990d:658) demonstrated this with regard to Robert Townson’s work in Shropshire in 1799. Until the appearance of Conybeare and Phillips’ book these problems were universal; this work, however, did little to clarify the situation in Yorkshire.
[10] Whilst delineating social aspects of science Rudwick (1972) inevitably sees the meaning of fossils as the pursuit of knowledge.
[11] Williams’ notebook for 1835-6 quoted by Rudwick (1985:151).
[12] Gideon Mantell quoted by Torrens (1990d:661).
[13] See, for example, Morley (1971).
[14] Geikie on Ramsay is an example; Robert Balgarnie’s (1864) tribute to the Scarborough collector, Peter Murray, entitled The Beloved Physician, is yet another.
[15] Taylor (1865:320).
[16] Davis (1889:423).
[17] Fitton, Bristol to De la Beche, Lyme Regis, 11 November 1825, NMW 531.
[18] Spencer Joshua Alwyne Compton (1 January 1790 – 17 January 1851).
[19] ‘Another heavy blow & great discouragement for Mantell from Owen who seemed to drop in by instinct just as the Doctor was holding his jaw – of the Iguanodon. Owen told him for the first time that he had a better one now under his examination’, Forbes to De la Beche, 2 June 1848, NMW 568.
[20] Phillips, York to De la Beche, 18 March 1842, NMW.
Simon Knell 