Darwin the Geologist

Our project manager, Dr Francis Neary, reflects on the planning and concept behind the ‘Darwin the Geologist’ exhibition:

When the project team was given the challenge of creating an exhibition on Darwin’s geology in this important year for Darwin’s memory, we quickly realised that our contribution to the celebrations would be one amongst many. In Cambridge alone there were tens of initiatives planned and worldwide there were hundreds. We were able to see a few of the early exhibitions and it struck us that most focussed on the Origin of Species and contained similar biographical narratives of the journey Darwin made to get to his most well-known work. This was something of a relief to us, as we knew that we had something different to say about the geological work that dominated Darwin’s early scientific career before the Origin was even conceived. However, we felt that we needed to get away from Darwin’s biography as much as possible and focus on our unique assets in order to produce an experience that stood out.

It was clear that Darwin’s geological specimens collected on the Beagle and the specimen catalogues that he used to record them were going to be the stars of the show. But there was also a supporting cast of an almost unknown charcoal portrait of Darwin from the early 1850s, the connections of the museum to one of Darwin’s important mentors Adam Sedgwick and his vast collections and archive, specimens collected by John Stevens Henslow and Charles Lyell in the museum’s collections and the research work that had been undertaken at the museum on the Beagle Collection after Darwin’s death. Surveying the objects that we had to make the exhibition and thinking about what we could do differently to make visitors want to come to yet another Darwin exhibition in this year of Darwin overload led us to a conceptual breakthrough. The exhibition should not focus on Darwin at all but the Beagle Collection of rocks and fossils instead.

The idea was to display a biography of the Beagle Collection rather than a biographical account of Darwin’s work in geology. By focussing on the objects we could showcase the rocks in many different contexts to tell the story of the collection to the present day. From this the questions we wanted to answer in the exhibition flowed: How was the collection conceived, collected, recorded, analysed, interpreted, stored and used to generate scientific knowledge by Darwin and other scientists? These questions helped us reveal the practices of making and using scientific collections and their roles in creating scientific knowledge. In thinking about these issues we moved away from seeing the collection through Darwin and came to new insights about Darwin by seeing him and his colleagues and successors through the collection. The resulting exhibition came to be not so much about Darwin alone but the multiple authors of the Beagle Collection and the status and importance of collections in making science.