Keywords

1 Introduction

In 1963, Claude C. Albritton (1913–1988), Hamilton Professor of Geology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, published a seminal book, The Fabric of Geology, that paralleled his later, famous The Abyss of Time from 1980. It was devoted to the philosophy of geology and the production of geological thought and was one of the results of the dissatisfaction of many American geologists with the training that was being given to students of the earth sciences in the years immediately following World War II. Similar concerns had permeated the Society’s debate over the years, and on the occasion of the celebration of its 75th anniversary in 1963, the councilors decided that the theme for the platinum jubilee meeting was going to be the philosophy of geology, a decision that resulted in the abovementioned book (Albritton 1963, v).

Consequently, the American Council of the Geological Society convened a committee to investigate the “state of the art” and to offer suggestions for its improvement. The logical structure – using the terminology of the philosophy of science of those days – of the earth sciences’ disciplines was at stake (Albritton 1963, v).

The Fabric of Geology began with a toast to James Hutton and continued with several essays dealing with the problems of geological observation and the scale of geological time and space, one of Albritton’s main themes of research throughout his life. Several chapters were centered on the question of the historic character of geology and whether or not this science had laws and theories of its own, another epistemological concern from those years. Plate tectonics were still far from the global agenda, but geologists were slowly moving toward the quantitative, to geochemistry and geophysics, and to the analysis of the chains of reasoning and inference (Podgorny 2005a).

The book devoted many pages to the tension between field observations and laboratory experiments. Fieldwork remained a crucial component of the discipline: in H. H. Read’s words, “Any man looking out of any window sees a geological laboratory in constant and full-scale operation” (quoted by Albritton 1963, vi). Geologists, it was said, had the unusual opportunity to observe the results of complex natural experiments that involved larger masses and longer periods of time. However, the small-scale experiments of the laboratory could establish new facts and inspire innovative hypotheses (Greene 1998).

Not surprisingly, the terms “museum” and “collections” are almost absent from the 372 pages of the book. Each term appeared just twice as if they were irrelevant to the study of the Earth, and, therefore, there was no place for them in the geological thought from the 1960s. No explicit reason was given to this absence, but, essentially, they were perceived as institutional refuges for those who were still attached to a descriptive tradition that had been a necessary precursor to the language and practices of experimental, real science but which was now obsolete. Museums had lost the allure and their status as places of research and learning that they had acquired a century earlier.

In fact, after the Second World War it had been forgotten – or it was on an agenda of being forgotten – that there had been a time when the practice of geology could not have been imagined or described without “journeys of intense labor employed in seeing every collection and professor that could be heard of, and purchasing every map, book, and print that has been published relative to the earth sciences, or to the political economy of the countries” (Gordon 1894). These words used to describe the endeavors of the Oxford Professor of Geology William Buckland (1784–1856) are much more than a portrayal of the obsessions of a British individual. According to historians Martin S. J. Rudwick, Pietro Corsi, and James Secord, this picture can be applied to the labor of most of Buckland’s contemporaries in England, the European continent or further afield.

Nineteenth-century geologists and anatomists – professionals and amateurs, provincial and metropolitan alike – expended much of their time and resources in the formation of collections. Collectors mobilized people, mules, boxes, bones, rocks, stones, gems, shells, books, maps, newspapers, and an incalculable amount of paper in their letters, labels, and packaging. Collectors dispatched and/or received objects by ship, train, and/or cart crossing and connecting the five continents. The scale of those movements relied upon freight and post and enabled the infinite possibilities of being inside a network for the exchange of data, specimens, and gifts. The span of a collection depended on the fortune or salary of the collector, on the institutional budget (if that was the case) as well as on the dimension of the network of correspondents and providers. The practice of collecting fossils, rocks, and stones created new objects especially designed to display or keep them, new skills, new professions, new economic activities, and new investigative tools linked to the provision of all that was needed for doing science and knowing the secrets of the Earth.

Having a collection often meant having the capacity to keep the objects in a space, to build and design special furniture and supports, to label, and to catalogue or record where the things were in order to manage their movements, as well as to teach and to learn how to read what these objects had to tell. Nineteenth-century public lectures or university classes were unthinkable without the collections in all their forms, still today a useful tradition if students want to distinguish a piece of pyrite from gold (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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“Oro,” photograph by Argentinean photographer Adriana Miranda, 2015. In fact, this is a sample of pyrite (fool’s gold), used in this case to mock at the contemporary art market. (©Adriana Miranda, courtesy of the author)

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The contrast with today cannot be sharper: Whereas the physical collection in the nineteenth century played a central role in the production and transmission of geological knowledge, a 100 years later they had vanished from the vocabulary and the practices of earth science practitioners, who, instead, had moved to a reliance on databases and the analysis of the data within them (see Aronova et al. 2017).

This chapter wants to show how museums and collections were treated by the historiography of earth sciences as well as to examine the coming into being, the vanishing and reemerging of museums and collections as spaces linked (or not) to knowledge production and artistic creation. It refers – without going into details – to the collections of minerals, rocks, fossils, meteorites, and gems, as well as inventories, books, catalogues, newspaper clips, and paper museums in the sense of Rudwick (2000).

A few notes for clarification are required. First,: in this chapter I use “earth sciences” to include paleontological collections, following the lines set by the History of Earth Sciences Society, although in some institutional settings paleontology is considered a branch of the life sciences.

Second, the chapter refers mostly to early nineteenth-century collections. Geology in its modern form emerged as a specific discipline late in the eighteenth-century, paleontology a couple of decades later. Comparative anatomy was the discipline and the institutional setting for the study of fossil vertebrates, and, therefore, the chapter uses “anatomists” to refer to people that collected fossils before the age of paleontology began. Botanists and zoologists, chemists and physicians, and men and women with no university education made collections, and it would be inaccurate to call them geologists or paleontologists.

Finally, the chapter does not follow a chronological line; it is structured around themes and reflections that reappear in the different sections.

2 Collections and Museums in Contemporary Literature: Reassessment and Neglect

In the 1980s, Martin J. S. Rudwick’s work on the history of geology and paleontology focused attention on the practices involved in the amassing of collections in a space that was not always called a museum: Sometimes it was a private room, a professor’s office, a cabinet, or a library. The diversity of the locations did not prevent the conception of collecting and collections as a practice and a space that, in concert with observations in the field, shaped the emergence of modern geology (Rudwick 1985).

Late twentieth-century historians of the earth sciences have shown that there was a continuum that connected the field, the library, the cabinet, university teaching, and the collections, and that there was not a clear divide between natural history and antiquarian practices (Rudwick 2008). They were connected by a visual language that had to be learned and transmitted by means of new visual devices such as geological maps and crystallographic models, which were combined with the use of topographic instruments and old miners’ practices that relied also on taste, smell, and touch (Rudwick 1976; Guntau 1996).

Collecting rocks, minerals, and fossils implied being immersed in a network of correspondents, creating local, regional, and international alliances, a circuit where things could circulate, and be compared and studied (Rudwick 1997). Letters and drawings had been in use since the Renaissance as a means of “cheap” and two-dimensional representations of complex three-dimensional data. The expansion of the market and navigation routes to Australia and the Americas, the industrial revolution, and the use of fossil energy added speed and distance to the dynamics that had existed since the early modern period and allowed for the transportation of the objects themselves rather than just information about them. Collectors and collections emerged everywhere, and they usually knew of the existence of each other and tried to be connected either by personal communication, visits, or by proxy devices such as catalogues, drawings, and illustrated books. Collections in order to circulate beyond their actual form had to be translated into paper following certain conventions and knowing what to remark in order to make the object readable for all of those sharing the conventions. Far from new, this was common practice since nature was conceived as something one can possess in a room (Findlen 1994; Olmi 1997).

The collections were, thus, real and “virtual,” three-dimensional, and in paper, objects, books, newspapers clips, and treatises,Footnote 1 but always conceived as a central research tool that required the organization of labor force and labor space, which very often interconnected the private and public, family life and professional activity. In France, England, Argentina, and Italy, wives, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters, cousins, in-laws, acquaintances, and relatives were mobilized in these kinds of small family enterprises, often structured against other family groups (Outram 1997; Podgorny 2021).

The description of French anatomist Georges Cuvier’s working place in the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle was in that sense paradigmatic: as Eigen (1997) stressed, Cuvier’s private study (or “laboratoire”) was organized like a “public office.” Secretaries, family members, collections, and plates were harnessed in mimicking the process of serial production. In contrast to the semblance of French order of Cuvier, William Buckland, who also worked with his wife and progeny, studied the collections either in the private space of their family kitchen and/or in his university room. Geologist Roderick Murchison (1792–1871), his colleague, has graphically described him sitting in the only empty chair, in his black gown, cleaning out a fossil bone from its matrix, and surrounded by rocks, shells, and bones in dire confusion. In Argentina, Florentino Ameghino (1853–1911) turned his house and bookstore in La Plata into one of the main centers of mammal paleontology from the late nineteenth century. There he not only kept and stored the Patagonian fossil collections made by his brother Carlos, but he also received his scientific guests, and wrote his extensive correspondence and voluminous publications (Podgorny 2005b) (Fig. 2). His French wife, no doubt, helped in the editing part of his work and accompanied him on field excursions. Thus, the spaces where collections were located and studied differed greatly and combined the private, the familiar, the public, and the state-funded.

Fig. 2
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Florentino Ameghino’s collections in his family house in La Plata as they were left at his death in 1911. Photograph from Argentinean newspaper… (Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata)

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Making collections was an economic enterprise that required the investment of considerable sums of money for paying the salaries of the excavators and for dispensing recompenses among the local field collectors. As the cases of Mary Anning (1799–1847) in England and Auguste Bravard (1803–1861) in Massif Central in France and later in the Argentine pampas show, becoming a fossil supplier to the big collectors was an interesting option for those living all the year round close to the sites where fossils can be found (Podgorny 2001, 2020, 2022; Creese 2007).

With the possible exception of the Royal Cabinet of Madrid (est. 1771), where some of the objects that arrived were presents for the King, fossil and paleontological collections were mostly the result of private investments and endeavors, and as such part of the market of natural history that exploded in the nineteenth century. The private ownership of fossils would partially change in the 1900s when some countries (for example, in Argentina) included fossils (although not mineral collections), archaeological remains, and subsoil resources as the property of the state. Other countries, however, never considered fossils as such, and they remained as property that could be sold, purchased, and inherited. This is why many collections became fragmented, as they were sold and lost after the death of the collector when, for example, the heirs did not inherit the obsessions of their parents or were not on the position to keep what absorbed their parents’ time when they were alive. Keeping a geological and or/fossil collection alive required an ever increasing amount of storage room, resources for renting or purchasing furniture, shelves, and space or for purchasing a big house. Such was the case of the American millionaire Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897), who used two of his Philadelphia houses for keeping the unopened boxes of the collections bought in Paris in 1878 (Podgorny 2021).

The problem of storage space was particularly an issue for the poor collectors and for the curation of fossil vertebrates, the mighty stars of the early nineteenth-century scientific world. The search for private and/or state patronage dates from those years, when George Cuvier, in his éloge to Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1800), his predecessor in the chair of Comparative Anatomy in Paris, pleaded for state support for the collections of the chair, an innovative approach that would see the emergence of the role of the state in funding both collections and their keepers (Outram 1978).

Nicolaas Rupke (1994) and Martin Rudwick (1985) have shown that in England this process happened later, as many of the gentlemanly geologists of those years were privately wealthy and did not work as employees. Rupke (1994, 12–13), for instance, argued that anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892), in choosing museum work in the late 1830s, did not move into a ready-made institutional niche for scientific study. Owen, the “English Cuvier” who coined the term “dinosaurs,” was the person in charge of describing the fossil Mammalia collected by Charles Darwin on his voyage on the Beagle. He spent most of his career as a museum curator and was the promoter of London’s new Museum of Natural History in South Kensington that opened in 1881. For Rupke (1994, 12–13),

both the concept and the architectural reality of museums as institutions of research, though at the time already well established in Paris, were still being developed in Britain. In fact, Owen himself was one of the main driving forces of the Victorian movement to provide accommodation for museum collections, to expand such collections, and to turn these to educational and research purpose.

That concept of the museum and its collections as the space for professional education happened also in Brazil and in the Parisian École de mines. In the latter institution, established in 1760 during the Ancien Régime, the mineralogical collections, comprising samples of raw and worked materials, were crucial for the training of prospective mining engineers who arrived from the Americas and other regions of the world to study in the French capital (Napolitani 2020).

In that context, learning how to manipulate minerals and fossils became crucial in a world where the exchange of specimens on an international scale helped in defining the global span of the new disciplines of geology and paleontology. Specimens were traded, accumulated in one place, cast, dispersed, sold, bought, and reshipped again to shape a universal vision of the history of the Earth and of the processes that defined the organization of crystals. Collections of minerals, models, and fossils became central to the modernization of the new disciplines and the reform of the language of natural history.

3 Absences, Forgetting, and Losses

The emergence and consolidation of the role of museums and collections as research and educational tools seems unquestionable. However, a review of some important general works published in English in the 1990s shows the same tendency observed in Albritton’ Fabric of Geology.

For instance, in Sciences of the Earth, the monumental and useful encyclopedia of events, people, and phenomena edited in 1999 by earth science historian Gregory G. Good, there are no specific entries either for “museums” or for “collections” (Good 1998). In the very extensive analytical index to these almost 1000 pages, “museum” only appears once in relationship to “museums of natural history” (p. 664), namely, to the entry on “Paleontology in Australia,” where the role of the exchange of fossil collections is explored and analyzed.

Martin Guntau, a refined German historian of mineralogy, contributed to this trend, placing the collections in a kind of prehistory of the discipline. Thus, his article from The Cultures of Natural History starts by saying:

In the natural history museums of London, Berlin, Vienna, New York and many other cities, there are always substantial displays of mineral, rocks and fossils. These public exhibitions often date back to the eighteenth century and derive from still older collections of curiosities. Such cabinets were a common feature of courtly furnishing; they served the combined functions of display, entertainment and improvement. Gemstones and other visually appealing minerals and striking natural productions – together with countless works of art- fascinated the wealthy and powerful. (Guntau 1996, 211)

Guntau could be partially right regarding the origin of some of those specimens, but those collections, as already remarked, continued to be used or were constituted in a context that went far beyond the cultures of curiosity from the early modern period. This is particularly true for the mineralogical, anatomical, and “paleontological” collections organized in the École Royale de Mines and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris (est. 1797), which, as will be discussed later, shaped the teaching collections of the Americas’ new republics. Furthermore, the early nineteenth century had great expectations for the potentialities of the collections. Among others, Frank James (2018) has analyzed the formation of the British Royal Institution’s mineral collection during the early nineteenth century and showed that, despite the initial enthusiasms and hopes entertained for it, geology and mineralogy did not then contribute to the process of industrialization, except in a negative manner. For him, applying scientific knowledge and method to practical problems was very difficult at the time and collections, therefore, were seen not as objects of fascination; quite the contrary, they were conceived as practical and useful tools. These were the years when the societies for the encouragement of arts, manufactures, and commerce in Europe and the Americas improved methods of extracting the ore, assaying, mining equipment, and crucibles and portable furnaces. Mineralogy and geology implied the encouragement of new collections and exhibitions.

Geological and mineralogical specimens and samples were everywhere, in part because of their connection to chemistry and the hopes of their use in modern industry. Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847), the French chemist, mineralogist, geologist, paleontologist, and zoologist, famous for his collaboration with Georges Cuvier on a study of the geology of the region around Paris, was also the founder of the Musée national de Céramique-Sèvres (National Museum of Ceramics), having been director of the Sèvres Porcelain Factory from 1800 to his death in 1847. There he worked to improve the art of enameling in France, making Sèvres one of the leading factories in Europe (Millasseau 1997; Auffret 2014). The collection he organized in Sèvres, as well as his Traité des arts céramiques, was developed on an insistence that there was an intrinsic connection between geology and the expanding industry of European porcelain. That connection can also be observed in England where the instruments, developed for the pottery furnaces of Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), would go on to be applied in experiments to calculate the Earth’s temperature (Chaldecott 1975). In the early nineteenth century, collections were in good shape, creating new products, and well-connected with the economic concerns of those years. In fact, one can argue that the emergence of paleontology and geological archaeoloy is rooted in the practice of recycling, namely, the excavation of recent and old garbage pits and the transformation of those deposits into scientific museum specimens (Podgorny 2016).

As for the historiography, the revision of the titles of the articles published in the biyearly journal Earth Sciences History exhibits a similar trend to that expressed before: collections and museum becoming marginal among the topics of this journal. The History of Earth Sciences Society started publishing its journal in 1982 to promote and publish historical work on all areas of the earth sciences: geology, geography, geophysics, oceanography, paleontology, meteorology, and climatology. The first issue included an article on an American fossil and mineral collection from the 1840s, but the reader has to wait until the second issue of 1986 for another note, in this case on the national gem collection at the Smithsonian Institution.

In its 40 years of existence, the journal has published ten articles whose titles refer to a specific collection and only five to museums, even when the journal encourages a variety of approaches to historical study that includes biography, history of ideas, social history, and histories of institutions, organizations, and techniques. The vast majority of the articles whose titles include “collections” dealt with fossils; some others – not included on the table – focused on the collector and a biographical approach. Only the two most recent articles on the role of museums in the exploration of the American West consider these institutions as a space of knowledge production (See Table 1 for the distribution of topic/publication year).

Table 1 Articles published in Earth Sciences History that contained “museum” or “collection/s” in the title. This survey does not include the few articles that referred to “collectors” or to the practice of collecting (https://meridian.allenpress.com/esh)
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Some of the articles published by this journal analyzed “lost collections” or “lost legacies,” such as Lardner Vanuxem’s collection of minerals and fossils, “lost” since its sale in 1853–1854 to W. M. Stewart of Clarksville, Tennessee. However, about 5 percent of the original 6000-specimen mineral collection still exists at Southwestern University in Memphis. The fossil collection, on the other hand, contained some 16,000 specimens, most of which were from the Lower Paleozoic of New York State. W. M. Stewart organized the collection on the basis of geological periods. No trace of the Vanuxem fossil collection exists today, although it was still in use in 1923 by students at Southwestern Presbyterian University, in Clarksville, Tennessee. Only recently, historians have started reflecting upon the fact that collections and museums are very far from what the International Council of Museums currently defines as a museum:

A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. (ICOM 2007)

This is not what history shows. Collections (and museums) are the opposite of permanent: museums and collections are fragile, ephemeral, and subjected to the contingencies of history. As Italian art historian Adalgisa Lugli said in 1983:

Sans doute, n’y a-t-il pas de véhicule plus éphémère que la collection auquel on puisse confier une idée ou une image du monde. L’œuvre-collection est incroyablement périssable, corrodée par une fragilité presque pathétique, exposée comme elle l’est à la dispersion, au mouvement continuel qui déplace les objets, les soustrait à un ensemble pour les déposer dans un autre, ou les isoler définitivement […] On pourrait la considérer comme le lieu de la non-existence, semblable au rivage de la mer, espace très particulier et insaisissable parce que perpétuellement bouleversé par le va-et-vient de la vague. Dans la collection, des mouvements contrastés et répétés modifient donc continuellement la physionomie de l’ensemble, lui interdisant d’atteindre à la stabilité de l’identification. Disons, tout au moins, que le moment définitif de la collection dure très peu de temps. (Lugli 1998, 91)

Without doubt, there is no more ephemeral vehicle than the collection, to which we can entrust an idea or an image of the world. The work-collection is incredibly perishable, corroded by an almost pathetic fragility, exposed as it is to dispersal, to the continual movement that displaces objects, removes them from one group to deposit them in another, or isolates them definitively [...] It could be considered as the place of non-existence, similar to the shore of the sea, a very particular and elusive space because it is perpetually disrupted by the coming and going of the wave. In the collection, therefore, repeated contrasting movements continually alter the physiognomy of the whole, preventing it from achieving the stability of identification. Let’s say, at the very least, that the definitive moment of the collection lasts a very short time.

Even when this remarkable definition dates from the early 1980s, they were not not taken into consideration by the literature in English until recently (see Lubar et al. 2017; Jardine et al. 2019).Footnote 2

This fate repeats itself in several American and British colleges, where the number of lost museums and collection is uncountable. It includes, among others, losses in small colleges such as Wofford Geological Museum and Collection (Spartanburg, South Carolina) and central institutions, such as Brown or Oxford University, where William Buckland’s collection represents a paradigmatic case of neglect. During Buckland’s lifetime, the collection was placed in Oxford’s Clarendon Buildings. Buckland’s wife Mary Morland had written or painted descriptive labels on all specimens that had come into her husband’s possession. Buckland bequeathed the collection to the Vice-Chancellor of the University for the use of the professors of geology who might succeed him, with all the geological charts, sections, and engravings that might be in the Clarendon Building at the time of his death. John Phillips (1800–1874), the successor to his Chair, proposed that the collection should henceforth be known by the name of Bucklandean Museum. A new building was erected in about 1858, to which the collection was removed. “The subsequent history of the collection” – said his daughter – “is a melancholy record of reject. Owing to a variety of causes, a great part of this valuable bequest to the University remains in the same condition (and with perishing labels) in which it was removed from the Clarendon thirty-six years ago” (Gordon 1894, 76). After Phillips’ death, the Buckland collection became “the collection in the cellars.” Thus, a collection famous as the first of its kind in Europe lay neglected and lost its labels at the same pace that Buckland’s name was being forgotten.

Whatever the chronology and the causes for this neglect, the result was a loss of meaning for the scientific agendas of successors. The stones and fossils were not the stable objects that they appeared to be. When Buckland was alive, the collection grew, was used, and generated new knowledge. Once he died, the collection as scientific instrument died with him and was turned into a historic object that occupied a space that other professors also wanted for placing their own books, instruments, and living collections. Scientific objects are transitory (Rheinberger 1997): Scientific museums and collections, as scientific tools that are part of a certain research agenda, share this character; they can disappear or turn into a mere historic curiosity. They can be revisited, of course, and reinterpreted, as has happened with several historic fossil collections where the specimens are named and renamed repeatedly. But despite this possibility, the neglected collections and the subsequent silence that certain historiography created around them speak of the artificiality of their existence, of the amount of care and money they needed to survive, and of the fact that this was not always available.

To conclude with the visibility of earth science history collections in recent literature, in 2020, Colligo, an independent journal devoted to the history of collections, published a special issue on the history of paleontological collections. Based upon papers given at a conference session entitled “How to build a paleontological collection: expeditions, excavations, exchanges,” held at the fifth International Paleontological Congress in Paris, France, in July 2018, it discusses museums in Copenhagen, Bologna, Brazil, and Berlin as well as private collections from central France and Mauritius. The issue demonstrated that the landscape of nineteenth-century collections is certainly much wider, more nuanced, and more complex than the current historiography, centered on the metropolitan collections assembled by northern Europe’s colonial powers, would suggest (Podgorny et al. 2020).

4 Collections and Museums in the Historiography from South America

Nearly two decades after the publication of Sciences of the Earth (Good 1998), the Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata (2016), a team with extensive research experience on the role of museums and collections and on the history of the training of scientists in general and geologists in particular, organized a Diccionario Histórico de las ciencias de la Tierra en la Argentina (2016). It was a collective work, much inspired by Good’s monumental encyclopedia. However, it decided to include specific entries for “Museums” and “Mineralogical collections.”

The first was dedicated to the history of local institutions. It described how the Minister Bernardino Rivadavia (1780–1845), one of the main promoters of the Buenos Aires public museum established in 1823, purchased from France a collection of 720 minerals and a group of scientific instruments for display in the cabinets of physics and natural history. The collections were devoted to the study of science and for teaching university students, reflecting the meaning that the word “museum” had in the Spanish dictionaries of the 1820s. For example, in the Diccionario de la lengua castellana, issued by the Real Academia Española in 1822 (pp. 544 and 554), “museo” had three definitions: first, the building devoted to the study of the sciences, the humanities, and the liberal arts; second, the place where several scientific curiosities, mathematical devices, and ancient medals were kept; and third, a coin collection, a “monetario,” a term also applied to the shelves, drawers, and tables in which the series of coins and medals were properly housed.

The Buenos Aires museum, one can say, fulfilled this definition thanks to the coin and mineralogical collections, the devices bought for the physics cabinet, and its institutional foci. However, it was founded without either the allocation of a building or the shelves and drawers that defined a museum. The museum was more an ideal than a place; as such, it was conceived in theory as “público,” emphasizing with this adjective that – even with no building – it belonged to the people and that it had been erected to serve all the citizens and interested people from other parts. It was only in 1826 that the museum was given a home – in the upper floors of the Santo Domingo Convent.

The acquisition of the French mineralogical collection can be seen as a device used to integrate the local samples of mineral into a universal order of minerals, namely, the mineralogical systems used in Paris. It can represent also what María Paola Rodríguez Prada, describing the early years of the National Museum from Bogotá, called a “global scientific geopolitics,” namely, the hiring of French graduates and the expansion of the methods and systems used at the Paris School of Mines; this included, in particular, René Just Haüy’s crystallographic system (Rodríguez Prada 2016). The French institutions were a very important model for the new republics, the Brazilian Empire (Lopes 2010, 2013), and also the USA, where American geologist Vanuxem held the chair of Chemistry and Mineralogy at South Carolina College (1792–1848) having graduated at the École de Mines in Paris in 1819. Vanuxem was well aware of the importance attached to museums and collections in France and spent some time in Albany arranging the state geological collection, out of which grew the New York State Museum. His private collection of mineral and geological specimens was considered at the time of his death to be “the largest, best arranged, and most valuable private collection in the country.” Now, it is almost lost (Kemmerly 1982).

French mineralogical methods, collection, and classification systems expanded but were, however, far from being monolithic, universal, or adopted without resistance. Mineralogists trained in other traditions than Haüy’s crystallography contested his terminology and method, not only in France and Europe but also in the new Republics. Thus, La Abeja Argentina from April 1822 – a kaleidoscope journal from Buenos Aires that included sciences, politics, and literature – translated “Analysis of the Red Silver Ore” and “P.S.,” two articles published in 1822 in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, in which Haüy’s crystallographic system was questioned. At stake was mineralogical taxonomy and related nomenclature, namely, forming names for objects in inorganic nature that could be accepted all over the world. This agenda was marked by considerable conflict; naming this “inorganic nature” with words signifying a quality, constituent, use, or locality proved to be very divisive, especially when mineralogists started naming minerals in a very generic way or after people.

When the Society for Physical Sciences and Mathematics of Buenos Aires recommended works to be used in the courses to be taught at the university, it included a variety of French works, notwithstanding the conflicting views of nature and of the history of the Earth that they expressed. “Ciencias, Lista de las obras que se pueden seguir para el curso completo de las ciencias físicas y matemáticas” (A list of the works to be used in the teaching of science) from La Abeja Argentina (3, 1822, pp. 105-107), included Alexandre Brongniart’s Traité élémentaire de minéralogie, avec des applications aux arts: ouvrage destiné à l’enseignement dans les lycées nationaux (1807); Jean André Deluc’s Traité élémentaire de géologie (1809, a defense of Mosaic Neptunism and a refutation of James Hutton and John Playfair); Georges Cuvier’s famous Le Règne Animal distribué d’après son organisation, pour servir de base à l’histoire naturelle des animaux et d’introduction à l’anatomie comparée (4 volumes, 1817); and Charles-François Brisseau de Mirbel’s Éléments de physiologie végétale et de botanique (1815), as well as André Marie Constant Duméril Traité élémentaire d’histoire naturelle (1803). In respect of mineralogy, geology, and natural sciences, it included Haüy’s treatises (Traité de minéralogie, 5 vols, 1801, and Traité élémentaire de physique, 1803, 1806) but also his rival Jean-Claude Delamétherie’s Leçons de Géologie (1816) et de Minéralogie (1811). Delamétherie was a contemporary of Haüy at Paris and, for a number of years, principal editor of the Journal de Physique. He gave offense to Haüy in some of his early publications by not crediting any of Haüy’s work (Corsi 2020; Oldroyd 2009).

In a context and a discursive tradition that alluded to nature as a source of wealth and common welfare, an education in natural history and in the art of drawing and observing natural objects was seen as the fundamental ground of a new citizenship based on the universals of reason and humanity. However, many of the Latin American museums created in the 1820s were in fact linked to the possibility of surveying the resources of a country following the standards of the relatively new scientific disciplines, such as geology, and the new classification systems used for vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants alike. The classification of the mineralogical and natural resources was crucial to promote commerce and attract new investors.

Thus, the Museo Nacional established in 1854 in the city of Paraná, the then capital of the Argentine Confederation, received a series of minerals and animals from several provinces. This included, among others, a collection of quartzite plus six samples of gold, silver, copper, and nickel ore from the Province of La Rioja; a collection of minerals from the Province of Córdoba sent in by the provincial governor; samples of copper from Catamarca; and samples of limestone and shells, ocher, clays, fuller’s earth, and fossil bones, all from the vicinity of the city of Paraná. The establishment of the Museo Nacional from Paraná is an episode connected to Argentina’s first participation in a World Fair, as part of the propaganda campaign launched in the process of organizing the Argentine Confederation (Podgorny and Lopes 2008; Lopes and Podgorny 2000).

Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, overseas products were displayed at periodical World Fairs held in various European capitals, where participating countries had to meet certain sets of rules regarding the selection and classification of their material. One was to form a local jury to evaluate the samples and determine whether they were truly representative of the country’s wealth. Within this framework, the Museo was conceived of as the place that would collate examples of the potential wealth of the nation, and be the institutional backing for the items Argentina sent to the World Fairs. From there, the image of bountiful nature was spread as the central propaganda argument aimed at those who might be interested in Europe. Following the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, South American states were invited to participate in these events by sending in raw materials produced within their national territories. In late 1853, Argentina was invited to participate in Paris’ 1855 Exposition Universelle des produits de l’Agriculture, de l’Industrie et des Beaux-Arts.

In August, just 1 month after the Museo Nacional had opened, the invitation to participate in the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris became the responsibility of its director. The provincial producers’ response to this call managed to exceed by far the collections that the museum had previously been able to put together. The director wrote a descriptive report to accompany the exhibit, preceded by a study of the country’s mines and mining industry, geographical notes, and an overview of the Confederation’s political structure and current laws on mining. The report emphasized the superiority of Argentina’s gold and silver mines over those of Australia and California, at least in terms of abundance. The Argentinean samples never returned to Argentina: Once the Universal Fair closed its doors, they were dispersed and donated to the French institutions that were willing to accept them (Podgorny and Lopes 2008).

Regarding the Diccionario’s entry for “Mineralogical collections,” Argentinean historian of science Susana V. García explored the role of mineral collections in the education of professional geologists. She explained how the nineteenth-century collections were sold and marketed by commercial houses intended for the teaching of mineralogy and the promotion of the associated classification systems. Whether in Paris, London, Rochester, or Buenos Aires, those houses prepared collections of mineral specimens classified following the system they were eager to expand through the museums, university chairs, and basic education schools. Another kind of collection sold by those commercial houses consisted of slides with transparent mineral cuts and sets of models of crystal shapes made of wood, most of them made or based on the French models. Today they are kept in the stores and displays of museums and university departments of mineralogy and crystallography, but they were sold originally to teach the external form of natural specimens. Their use was for identification and demonstration purposes, by scientists, teachers, and students from the late eighteenth century onward, a study that continued into the twentieth century.

The eye of professional geologists was not only trained by means of those collections: Collections taught them that these kinds of objects could be commercialized and could help to develop their local and international careers. In fact, what collections teach historians is that many geologists and natural history professors decided to partner with commercial providers for selling and organizing new teaching and museum collections. Collections as matters of exchange – in the sense of Harold Cook (2007) – played different roles: They were commercial objects, used for teaching, for the consolidation of classification systems and no less important for the building of international reputations.

The Capellini Museum in Bologna, Italy, still displays some of them, including the collection of Nummulite, a type of foraminifera, organized by the Austrian-Hungarian geologists Maximilian Hantken von Prudnik (1821–1893) and Eduard Sigismund von Madarász. The Nummulite collection from Bologna reveals how collections circulated connecting museums located in the capitals and also in the provinces. Collections today are used by historians to reconstruct the circles that met at the international exhibitions and congresses and related people and places (Lopes and Matos 2015). For instance, the Nummulite collection and its catalogue were exhibited in the universal exhibition in Paris in 1878, which was accompanied by an international geological congress that reunited, for instance, the American Edward Cope, the Italian Giovanni Capellini, the Italo-Argentine Florentino Ameghino, and Austrian-Hungarian Maximilian Hantken (Podgorny 2021).

5 Collection of Minerals as Source of Artistic Inspiration

The new disdain for the museum has been as international as was its nineteenth-century respect. One of the landmarks of this trend was the demolition late in the 1960s of half of the original building of the Geological Capellini Museum in Bologna (established in 1881) to use the land for erecting new laboratories. The old collections had to be moved to the remains of the old building which still keeps the historical showcases and collections but in a denser way that in its early days, creating structural problems given the extra weight the building has to carry. Undoubtedly, some geologists tried and succeeded in sending part of the collections to the cellars or to the garbage pit. However, at the same time the collections were being discarded from scientific use, now more concerned with the collection of data, those mineralogical collections became the source of inspiration for twentieth-century artists, thinkers, and architects dealing with shape, morphology, and structures (Tamborini 2022).

French mineralogist François Farges (2020) has dedicated part of his work to track the uses of minerals in the arts and applied industries. He has shown how minerals can be regarded from different point of views, including the scientific, technical, and artistic as well as their use and employment in jewelry. Collections are multidimensional, and the emphasis on the exhibits of wonder normally neglected that in the collection of natural samples there was always the potential for nonscientific use. In particular, minerals and stones, rocks, and fossils had been associated with mining and architecture. The columns and the walls from the Natural History Museum in Oxford or the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen are, in reality, samples of the local geological materials that could be used in architecture. The museum building in Oxford opened in 1860 and is an example of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture, a style strongly influenced by the ideas of nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin. Around the court perimeter are 126 columns, each made from a different British decorative rock, labeled with the name of the stone and its source. As for Copenhaguen, the walls mimic fossils in their construction.

In the realm of literature, mineral collections inspired George Sand (1804–1876) who, in 1865, located her novel Laura. A Journey into the Crystal in the halls of a mineral collection that resembled that of the Parisian Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. In the plot, while working for his uncle, Alexis Hartz is introduced to a woman who shares his scientific interests, and in particular his fascination for crystals. She has discovered a way to enter this world, and together they travel the vast and glittering landscape. Similarly, Jules Verne (1828–1905) expressed his fascination with crystals in his Voyage au centre de la Terre, which shaped our vision of the giant crystals from Brazil that since the 1980s have been exhibited in the Mineralogy Gallery of the Muséum.

In the twentieth century, the crystal became the symbol of a new purity. American-German painter Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) and German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969), founder of the Bauhaus School, adopted the crystal as a principal motif. The cube that fascinated Haüy, and which was modeled to teach geometry, reappears in the works by French artists George Braque (1882–1963) and Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Around 1932, the Hungarian-French photographer Brassaï (1899–1984) took pictures of the minerals and crystals exhibited in the Muséum that were going to be published in the Surrealist-oriented magazine Minotaure by André Breton, who proclaimed that only these objects can explain what was real beauty. Adriana Miranda’s photograph of the pyrite is an Argentine descendant of this tradition of working with the light of the minerals (See Fig. 1).

This relationship between art, writing, and mineral collections had not finished there. The French intellectual Roger Caillois (1913–1978), as it is well known, has accused André Breton and followers of having sunk into the veneration of the irrational. He proposed to join the two domains of “investigation and poetry,” in order to establish a link between the weft of dreams and the chain of knowledge. Caillois had, already at the time of his rupture with Breton, begun the sketch of a subversive and revolutionary science, which “would not despise the obscure side of the Nature.” His very personal vision of the natural sciences allowed Caillois to imagine a form of interdisciplinary knowledge in which invisible, subterranean relations had to be exhumed in order to allow the blooming of a new and more complex image of the universe. In that frame, Caillois published L’écriture des pierres, a late work from 1970 in which he applied his interpretative talents to the stones that he had collected for decades, gathering a 100 specimens preserved today in the Mineralogical Galleries of the Parisian Muséum National d’histoire naturelle. Caillois in 1970 “was struck by a curious property of the imagination, which is that it is not deterred when challenged to interpret or identify. I realized that men had never ceased to read the drawings on the stones and to recognize in them gods, landscapes, panoramas of ruined cities, dragons, unicorns, bulls, swordfish. Such a power to secrete metaphors is practically boundless, as seems irresistible the need that this faculty is not hardly asked to satisfy. It is not held back by verisimilitude: it is even often encouraged by the insufficiency or the ambiguity of the support” (Caillois 1970; Gioni 2014). For Caillois, nature revealed itself as a superfluous delight, as if moved by caprice. Art becomes a geological question, as vast as the world itself. Caillois’ writing of the stones resulted from the crossroads of the visual order and the poetic order. In this sense, it was truly writing only made possible by the art of collecting.

This chapter concludes with reference to another rock collection, in this case, one made by German percussionist Alexej Gerassimez (1987–), who on May 19, 2022, presented at the Konzerthaus Berlin “Stonewave” a work for a percussionist’s duo. I was inspired by a quotation attributed to J.W. Goethe and Erich Kästern: “Auch aus Steinen, die einem in den Weg gelegt werden, kann man etwas Schönes bauen “(Even from the stones that are put in your way, you can build something beautiful”). Gerassimez, in fact, extracted sound from his collection of stones. “As its core” – he said in the program of the performance – “I explore the sound and shape of rocks. From rather porous and capricious natures we can tell amazingly harmonious stories.” May be, some of the stones he is using came from a lost collection, disguised as instruments of contemporary music.

6 Conclusion

Museums and collections generated and channeled a flow of data, natural specimens, and artifacts that, through their relationship with people, traveled to diverse places, and in a variety of directions. Collections connected places and people in most unexpected ways and generated new collaborations. Through their relationship with people, they traveled and connected the world from the nineteenth up to the twentieth century, creating networks that were not necessarily centralized around either European metropolises or their respective national museums.

In the analysis of collections, there is a historiographical problem linked to changing disciplinary boundaries and concerns and, therefore, the changing role that the same specimen could have played in different arenas and in different periods of history. For example, gems, rocks, fossils, and minerals – the objects of study of mineralogy and sedimentology – were collected and studied also in pharmacies and medical cabinets up until the eighteenth century; this is still reflected in some exhibitions such as those in the in the geological galleries at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. However, most medical mineral collections were transferred as curiosities to pharmacy museums, or discarded as mere rubbish from the past. Gem stores, on the other hand, continue to sell minerals using the teaching of old pharmacopeias but marketed as New Age goods (See Duffin et al. 2013).

Collections of minerals, rocks, and fossils, of course, did not start with geology. Are the mineral collections and lapidaries from ancient, medieval, and early modern times part of the history of the earth sciences? Some historians and museum curators would say yes, some would choose to treat them as prescientific, and some would discard them from the realm of natural history and science even when they sell well both on the Internet and in real life. This chapter, working in the instable borders of disciplines, aims at helping to answer these kinds of question, which still have implications for our contemporary order of things.

Returning to The Fabric of Geology with which this chapter began: The chapter by Arthur Hagner (1963) was devoted to the problem of scale. He suggested that a mountain could not be taken into the laboratory. Nineteenth-century geologists, however, did try, through their samples and series, to do just that; in many cases, their efforts have been lost, and they created collections that, even when dispersed, are inspiring today new human creations. Collecting is not only a catalyst, a good sample of how the changing institutions that house, or housed, them are linked to the unexpected uses to which scientific collections have been put – and, therefore, the changing fortunes and uses of museums and similar institutions.