Thanks to a great suggestion from Olivia, who visited Oxford on her trip with the Victorian Society of America, we visited that famous English town for the first time last week. I'll let the pictures from the Natural History Museum do the talking here. Suffice it to say that we could have spent hours staring at the manifold mind-blowing collections, displayed with reverence and decorum in this venerable old building with a thousand moorish arches reminiscent of the mezquita in Cordoba. The birds and butterflies are enough to make anyone want to become a biologist (a 19th century one, at least) and as for the anthropologist (or anthropophagist?) real shrunken heads are also on display, complete with a detailed description of how certain Amazonian tribes removed, heated, shrank, and sewed together again the skins of their victims!!
1 comment:
I LOVE these kinds of natural history displays, even if they are out of fashion. Fortunately the "cabinet of wonders" concept is experiencing a resurgence in popularity, helped in part by your sister's work at the Walters in Baltimore years ago.
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