Darwin the Geologist

What happens when you gather two classes of eight-year-olds, tell them all about Charles Darwin, then let them loose in a room full of art supplies?

The Sedgwick Museum has been finding out with the help of creative practitioners from Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination. The results of two, day-long art sessions at two different schools will be displayed on the temporary barrier enclosing the area undergoing development for the Darwin the Geologist exhibition.

This Saturday the Museum will unveil the exhibition of children’s artwork inspired by Darwin and his collections. The young artists from St Philips Primary School and Milton Road Primary School have been invited to the museum to see their work on display. Exclusively for our on-line visitors, here is a preview of some of their efforts.

When it comes to collections, things are not always as they seem. This fact was brought home to the staff of the Sedgwick Museum last week when an attempt to shed light on a letter found in a Beagle Collection drawer led researchers to an odd conclusion.

Researchers at the Sedgwick Museum have been digging into anything Darwin-related in the Museum’s collections for some time now, hoping to find specimens and stories to display in the new exhibition. Although most of the hunt involves our petrological specimens from the Beagle voyage - kept in our storage facility in West Cambridge, recent efforts have centred on a lone drawer labelled ‘Beagle Collection’ located in the main Museum gallery.

Unlike the drawers in West Cambridge, this drawer contains almost entirely shell material. Some is fossilised, some is apparently fresh (as of 1835), but unfortunately only some of it is labelled. In this condition, the drawer leaves the Sedgwick Museum with more questions than it answers; What exactly are all the specimens inside? Why are some of them annotated in French? How did they come to be in the Sedgwick Museum?

To help prepare the specimens for display, research fellow Dr Lyall Anderson delved into the history of Darwin’s shell collections and came up with a possible explanation for the specimens’ French connection. According to Lyall, although most of Darwin’s shell material was described by J de C. Sowerby and is now at the Natural History Museum London, these specimens might have returned from Alcide d’Orbigny in Geneva who also identified some samples for Darwin.

The Sedgwick researchers hoped the contents of a letter found in the same drawer might clarify the situation. The letter, in French, in a florid copperplate script was illegible to the staff at the Museum. Luckily outside help was at hand in the form of Dr Yves Candela of the National Museums of Scotland who quickly relayed his findings back to the Sedgwick.

‘First of all when Lyall asked me to translate this letter I went through it quickly but found out as quickly that it wasn’t really relevant to Lyall’s study on Darwin’, explains the French palaeontologist.

‘It is addressed to Dr. A. Gayaux or Gayaur, a surgeon in Geneva. The letter to this doctor explains the problem about Mr Ducruz Marie who has a bad foot. Many attempts were made to cure whatever he is suffering from… It described that many doctors were sought but no luck. The letter is signed Vincent xxxxx (I cannot decypher the surname)’

Although Museum staff are no closer to understanding the contents of the drawer the letter has brought up some interesting questions about the origins of the Museum’s collections - Mr Ducruz Marie probably never knew the part his foot problem played in wrapping Mr Charles Darwin’s fossil specimens.