‘Nature Collected’ by Sydney Chapman

at Penrith and Eden Museum

Article by Sydney Chapman

From its early days the Museum has benefitted from the expertise and patronage of natural historians. Some had been members of the Penrith Literary and Scientific Society and were keen to advance this branch of knowledge. It was a period when the close observation of nature by scientists was being shared by artists, designers and architects who took inspiration from its forms.

There was a shift away from collecting items for their curiosity and aesthetic interest rather than educational value. It inspired the Museum’s first Honorary Curator Dr. Michael Taylor to acquire the geological collection of the late Admiral Wauchope of Dacre which forms the core of a collection of over 1,700 specimens of rocks, minerals and fossils - including the reptile footprint in sandstone from Lazonby predating the age of the Dinosaurs. The minerals include specimens from the North Pennines and Caldbeck fells; there is also a Victorian miner’s spar box containing an assortment of crystalline minerals including quartz, hematite (sphalerite) and ‘kidney ore’ set in wax. The local minerals had been explored by J. G. Goodchild of the Geological Survey who discovered wulfenite in the Caldbeck Fells. He was also interested in ornithology and the Museum has his large painting of a pair of ‘Greenland Falcons’ which were the subject of his paper ‘On the Occurrence of the Iceland Falcon in Edenside’, published in 1882. There, with far-sighted ecological awareness, he lamented the depredation of falcons caused by ‘gun, net, snare, trap and poison’, adding the ‘greed of the collector’ to the list. There is a small collection of mounts of birds including dotterel, buzzard, widgeon, kestrel, partridge, great-crested grebe; merlin; quail, dotterel and smew; also a corncrake which used to be a common breeder across the UK.

There are cases of butterflies and moths and a few mammal heads and horns mounted on black shields. A few bear the taxidermist’s label of H J Brown & Son, Naturalist, Furrier and Plumassier, Wardour Street, London, some inscribed as being prepared for Sir Henry Vane.

Dr. Taylor also gave his own extensive herbarium of pressed plants comprising around 700 sheets formed mainly between 1827 and 1841. He obtained many specimens through the active botanical exchange scheme which existed in the 19th century. As a young graduate at Edinburgh he had assisted Professor Balfour in re-arranging and classifying the herbarium of the Botanic Garden. There are excellent examples of an Australian trumpet shell (Syrinx Aruanus) belonging to the largest species of snail, and bailer shell (Melo melo), used to bail water out of boats or as scoops for powdery substances; and finally, specimens of yew and oak trees from the Hastings submarine forest, which ran along a stretch of the Sussex coast about four thousand years ago.