'Where is the damned collection?' Charles Davies Sherborn's listing of named natural science collections and its successors

Abstract

C. D. Sherborn published in 1940, under the imprint of Cambridge University Press but at his own expense, Where is the - Collection? This idiosyncratic listing of named natural science collections, and their fates, was useful, but incomplete, and uneven in its accuracy. It is argued that those defects were inevitable, given Sherborn's age and wartime conditions, and that what might seem one of Sherborn's less impressive works was in fact a pioneering work highly influential in stimulating the production of successor works now much used in curation, and in systematic and descriptive biology and palaeontology. The book also contributed to the development of collections research in the natural sciences, and the history of collections and of museums.

Keywords: Charles Davies Sherborn; biology; collections; geology; museums; taxonomy.

Figure 1.

A The cover of Where is the – Collection? B A sample page (p. 29) from Where is the – Collection?, including the entry for John Calvert. The Sowerby women are thought to be the daughters of G. B. Sowerby I (1788–1854) (R. J. Cleevely, pers. comm. 2014).

Figure 2.

The final bill from Cambridge University Press, tipped into a copy of Where is the – Collection? in the NHM Library. Photo courtesy R. J. Cleevely, NHM.

Figure 3.

A sample page (p. 9), including the entry for Mary Anning. This misses her specimens in the British Museum (Natural History).

Figure 4.

Differing treatments of Thomas Hawkins. A The original Sherborn entry in Where is the – Collection? (p. 67) B The much more extensive entry in World Palaeontological Collections (Cleevely 1983, p. 147).