Exploring our archives

Overseeing the current polar exhibition at the Royal Society is a lone penguin. Percy, who normally guards the manuscripts in the basement, is one reminder of the large collection of animals that once inhabited part of the Royal Society. The animal specimens sent to the Society from around the world were catalogued along with the plants by Nehemiah Grew (1641 - 1712) in his Musaeum Regalis Societatis or catalogue of the natural and artificial rarieties belonging to the Royal Society, to which he added his ‘comparative anatomy’ of stomachs and guts. At this time, the repository was housed in Gresham College, depicted here by Grew himself.

Grew is normally remembered for his work as Curator of Plants for the Society between 1672 and 1673, during which time he produced his best known work, ‘The Anatomy of Plants Begun’, which was pioneering in its use of microscopy and meticulous description. As Bolam pointed out in her article on this work (1), Grew’s use of comparison and his investigation of the specific functions of different parts of plants were also highly original. In his catalogue of rarities, Grew takes similar approach to his descriptions of animals - most of which he had never seen alive. For example, he not only describes the tail of an elephant in detail, but also tries to explain its purpose:

One that considers the Teeth of a Horse, sees the reason why he hath so long an upper Lip; which is his Hand, and in some sort answers to the Proboscis of an Elephant; whereby he nimbly winds the Grass in great quantities at once into his Mouth. . .That being much pestered by flies he should have a long brush tail to whisk them off. Whereas the Ass, which either for the hardness or drynesse of his Skin, or other Cause, is less anoy’d with them, hath no need of such a one.’

Thinking about a leopard, he reconstructs its movements by comparing it to a cat: ‘If they are well compar’d, he is in every way, shape, like a Cat: his Head, Teeth, Tongue, Feet, Claws Tail all like a Cats; he boxes with his forefeet as a Cat doth her Kitlins; Leaps at the prey like a Cat at a Mouse; and will also spit much after the same manner.’

Often Grew makes use of the accounts of travel that the Royal Society received from around the world to correct older assumption about animals. Describing the hippopotamus he notes:

‘Aristotle falsly gives him a Maine, like that of the Horse: deluded, ’tis likely by the Name [i.e. ‘River horse]. Kirchner falsly gives him Horses Teeth’ using Linschoten: ‘Several Teeth, both of the upper and nether Jaw of the Hipopotamus. Some so big, that they seem to have belonged to a much bigger skull, than this here’.

Grew, of course was not immune from the dangers of extrapolating from second or third hand accounts of far-off places, in one passage he warns, based on the account of the Dutch physician Bontius’ account of the wildlife of Java that a rhinoceros ‘will licking a Man to death by raking away the flesh to the Bone with his sharp and rough tongue’!

Grew’s catalogue was far more than a simple list of the contents of the Royal Society’s repository, it also contains some important work towards classifying species of animals and plants. Grew named many of the species he describes for the first time and unlike Linnaeus, who choose his names based on places and sometime people as well as appearences, Grew argued that ‘For so, every name were a short definition’, rather than the place it is found – ‘For it often falls out, that the same Thing breeds in many Places’.
(1) Jeanne Bolam. ‘The Botanical Works of Nehemiah Grew, F.R.S. (1641-1712).’ Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1938-1996) Volume 27, Number 2 / 1973

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