The University Museum is
unmistakable with its wide lawn and Victorian architecture.
Photographs from the turn of the century show the interior of
the main hall
to have changed little to the present day. The museum was
begun in 1855, built with £30,000 from the University and
money from private subscribers. The building consists of a glass roof
supported by ornate and naturalistic wrought ironwork made
by the best English craftsmen.
The columns,
made of different types of rocks found in the British Isles,
have capitals and bases representing groups of animals and plants.
Statues of
famous scientists line the walls. Some of the craftsmen who
carved the stonework in the museum were Irish; they had also
worked on the National
Museum in Dublin.
On the same wall as the museum entrance is a large portrait of a dodo and the
sad remains of one of these birds in a case. This particular dodo was exhibited
alive in London in 1638. On its death, its preserved remains became one of
John Tradescant's "natural curiosities", of which more later. In 1755, after
many years of neglect, the rotten remains were incinerated. Only a foot and the
skull survived.
The museum contains much of interest. Dominating the central area
is a cast of the fossil skeleton of an iguanodon.
This herbivorous Cretaceous dinosaur was discovered in a Belgian
coal mine in 1877.
Also in the central area is a huge ammonite, dug up during the
construction of the M40 motorway. On the south staircase is a live bee
colony.
It is fascinating to think that the museum also contains
the room where T. H. Huxley,
"Darwin's bulldog", confronted Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of
Oxford, during the great nineteenth-century
debate on the validity of
the theory of evolution and the alternative story of the Creation
in the Bible. During a British Association meeting, the Bishop, nicknamed
"Soapy Sam",
resorted to sarcasm. Turning to Huxley, he asked whether it was on
his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that he was descended
from an ape. Infuriated, Huxley replied that he would rather have
an ape for a grandfather than
a man like the Bishop who used his talents to ridicule
serious scientific discussion. The botanist Joseph Hooker
was also very influential during
this debate in his support of Darwin.
By the end of Darwin's life the theory of
evolution was widely accepted. Modern research
in genetics lends further support
to the theory.
At the rear of the University
Museum is "Oxford's best kept secret". This is the Pitt
Rivers Museum, named after
General Pitt Rivers, who was the first person to attempt a
methodical and stratigraphical excavation of an archaeological site.
The museum is laid out as it was in Victorian times. The vast collection
of objects of ethnographic interest includes many of scientific value; for
example, there is an arrangement of water-filled glass globes
from Scandanavia for magnifying the light from a candle.
Two modern-day scientists of note, Niko Tinbergen and Dorothy Hodgkin,
did some of their research in the University Museum.
Dorothy Hodgkin, chemist and crystallographer, had a long
connection with Somerville College. As Dorothy Crowfoot,
she was at the college as
an undergraduate and returned to Oxford in 1934 as a tutor in
chemistry. In 1937 she married Thomas Hodgkin, an African specialist,
and they had three children. In her research work, she used X-ray
crystallography to study the chemical structure of large organic
molecules, and by 1945 she had determined the structure of penicillin.
In 1947 she was elected to the Royal Society
as one of its first woman members. Her next task was to
resolve the structure of vitamin B12, which took until
1956. In 1964 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
She went on to solve the structure of insulin in 1969, and
was one of the
first to use a computer in such work.
Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch ethologist,
was for many years head of the Animal Behaviour Research Group
at Oxford University. His book Curious Naturalists describes in a
charming and entertaining way some of the work he did during
his long career. Tinbergen's work began
with the study of the way a species of wasp,
Philanthus triangulum Fabr., finds its
home in the sand, and how this species hunts bees to feed its larvae.
He did extensive field observations of the
black-headed gull.
On Tinbergen's arrival in Oxford a colleague pointed out that
he had chosen the worst place in Britain to study gulls, Oxford
being far from the sea in all directions.
In 1973 he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or
Medicine with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch.
The award acknowledged the relevance of ethological research
to the study of human behaviour.
