This once belonged to an elephant bird, and has been lent to the Royal Society by Sir David Attenborough. It will go on display on 3 July as part of an exhibit in the Summer Science Exhibition, but in the meantime you can read more about it in this article.

This anonymous caricature pokes fun at Sir Joseph Banks and his penchant for collecting. It was published in 1788 in a pseudonymous volume by contemporary satirist John Wolcot: “Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco. A Tale. By Peter Pindar, Esquire.”

The tale takes the form of a 17-page poem, which I won’t reproduce here, but I would recommend seeking it out. To whet your appetite, here is the second half of the poem’s prefatory argument, which sets the scene for the verse that follows:

“Sir Joseph, in a Pointer-like Manner, ambulateth – he espieth the Emperor of Morocco [a fictitious species of butterfly] – Peter conjectureth as to Sir Joseph’s Joy on the occasion – … – Sir Joseph’s Pursuit – the President tumbleth – … – Sir Joseph again tumbleth – Sir Joseph’s Hat tumbleth with him – Sir Joseph riseth and bloweth – he is gazed at by a Countryman – he darteth through a Hedge in Pursuit of the Emperor, and tumbleth into a Lane – he getteth up speedily, and putteth a Question to Hob – Hob answereth not, but pitieth him – Sir Joseph obtaineth a second View of the Emperor – pursueth his Majesty into a Garden – oversetteth the Gardener – trampleth on rare flowers – breaketh many Bell Glasses – overturneth the Scarecrow – Peter praiseth the Scarecrow – Sir Joseph oversetteth a hive of Bees – the Bees surprized – they attempt a Revenge, but succeed not, on Account of the hard and tough materials of Sir Joseph’s Headpiece – The Gardener, quitting his horizontal Position, pursueth Sir Joseph – Sir Joseph pursueth the Emperor, and the Emperor flieth away – The Gardener collareth Sir Joseph, and expostulateth – Sir Joseph heedeth not the Gardener’s Complaint, being in deep Sorrow for the Loss of the Emperor – The Gardener quitteth his Gripe in Sir Joseph, and putteth him down for a Lunatic – the Gardener execrateth Sir Joseph’s Keeper, and falleth into a Panic – flieth off unceremoniously, and leaveth the President in the Situation of a celebrated prophet.

And, as the closing couplet of the poem states:
“Such is the tale – if readers sigh for more
Sir Joseph’s wallet holdeth many a score.”

You can see more details about this image, and a couple of other (more sedate) garden pictures from our collections in this online gallery. Whatever your preferred outdoor pursuits, I hope you manage to enjoy some time in the sunshine too.

Cholera was, and still is, by all accounts, a thoroughly unpleasant way to expire, as Irwin W. Sherman recounts in Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World (2007):

“At first, the symptoms produce no more than a surprised look as the bowels empty without any warning.  Then surprise changes to agony as severe cramping pains begin.  Copious quantities of liquid, resembling rice water, pour through the anus.  As the pain intensifies, the only small relief is to draw oneself into a ball, chin held against the knees; the breath whistles softly between the teeth.  When death occurs at this stage, the body cannot be unrolled and the victim has to be buried in the fetal position.  Those who do not die from this first attack suffer a slow and painful decline.  The cheeks become hollow, the body liquids surge more slowly but still remain beyond control, and the watery stools contain fragments of the intestinal lining.  As the hours pass, the skin darkens, the eyes stare vacantly [...] and then life ends.”

In England, the key figures in combating the spread of cholera were John Snow (1813-1858), a physician who charted the spread of the disease and linked it to the contamination of drinking water; and Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), who pioneered sanitary reforms for the improvement of public health.   The item that caught my eye, however, was by Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogoff (1810-1881), entitled Anatomie Pathologique du Cholera-Morbus.  Pirogoff (also spelt Pirogov) was an eminent Russian surgeon, member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and winner of their Demidov Prize on three separate occasions.  He is known for his influence on field surgery, having served as a military surgeon, for progressing the use of plaster casting in the treatment of fractures and for compiling the four-volume Topographical Anatomy of the Human Body (1851-1854).

Pirogoff’s Anatomie Pathologique du Cholera-Morbus, however, was a work made possible by the cholera epidemic that swept through Russia in the first half of the Nineteenth Century.  Pirogoff’s research was the result of more than 500 autopsies performed on cholera victims, examining the pathological effect of cholera on the cells and the organs of the sufferers.  Through this, he was able to ascertain two different types of cholera, simple cholera and compound cholera, and the symptoms each entailed.  This work focuses on the visual changes in cells and organs caused by the progression of cholera in the system, exploring how it attacks and following the different processes and changes. 

The images in the book are vividly coloured lithographs based on drawings by C. A. Meyer showing the effect of different types of cholera on cells, organs and membranes in the body.  Many are certainly not for the squeamish!  They do, however, provide a fascinating insight into the sheer amount of detail that went into the work undertaken by artists working in collaboration with scientists and doctors, particularly during this time, work that was made extremely difficult by the presumed lack of physiological knowledge on the part of the artist. 

The image presented here is a plate taken from the stomach of a patient who died in the ‘cold’ stage of cholera.  What is interesting here is the cultural as well as the medical implications, indicated by the presence of mushrooms in the stomach.  As Pirogoff notes, the patient died during the Russian Great Lent at which time dried mushrooms formed a large part of the diet and despite the vomiting that occurred in this case, there were still some to be found in the stomach – though this was not altogether unknown.  Pirogoff goes on the describe the condition of the stomach, noting that the mushrooms appeared to be almost attached to the mucus membrane of the stomach, which was itself highly swollen and dotted with suffusions of blood.

Pirogoff’s work provides an engaging insight into the changes the body underwent during the various forms of cholera.  The sheer number of autopsies he and his colleagues performed enabled him to identify the varieties of cholera and the ways in which they affected the human body to better enable medical professionals to understand the disease.  The artwork in the Anatomie Pathologique du Cholera-Morbusmay not exactly be beautiful; but the level of work put in by the artist into the striking images is certainly on a par with the effort undertaken by Pirogoff in his research.

The contents of the booklet are as follows:

1. STRUTHIOMIMUS     or, The Folly of Being Too Clever.
2. ANOMALUS OBSCURUS     or, The Perils of Parthenogenesis.
3. THE BULLDOG     or, The Disadvantages of Domestication.
4. MEGATHERIUM     or, Let Down by Lamarck.
5. TRIASSOCHELYS     or, The Evils of Specialization.
6. MAN     A Success Story.

To give you a flavour of Maynard Smith’s poetic style, here is a transcription of the Preface:

Prof, though we strive, how vain it is
To try to take the mental place
Of worms and wasps and wallabies,
Of dogs, or dragon-flies, or dace,

Weep for the Dinosaurs’ defeats
A hundred million years agone
Or suffer with the heart that beats
Beneath an exoskeleton. 

We, creatures of heredity,
In bondage ever to our birth
Are sundered by neoteny
From these our kin that crawl the earth.

With Huxley we must disagree,
Who thinks it was the line to take;
When Man descended from his tree
We feel it was a great mistake.

But, being down, we feel we should
Attempt to succour and advise
Our fellow species for their good,
For Man, we know, is man the Wise. 

The tallest heads extinction loops,
For where has Brontosaurus gone,
What’s happened to Triceratops,
And where is now Pteranodon? 

And hence this offering to the Press.
We dedicate it jointly to
Professor HALDANE F.R.S.
And all the creatures at the Zoo.

My personal favourite of all the poems in the collection has to be number 4, Megatherium – a story of unrequited love in the tree tops. The first page of this appears below, and please do click on the image to download a pdf of the whole sad tale…

Click image to download pdf

John Maynard Smith had been interested in natural history since his childhood, inspired by visits to London Zoo and the Natural History Museum and pursued during holidays at his grandparents’ home on Exmoor. At Eton he took refuge in the library, particularly enjoying essays by J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley, and according to his Biographical Memoir he “was later to claim that he read Haldane because he was an author strongly disapproved of by his schoolmasters”.

Haldane was to have a strong and enduring influence on Maynard Smith in later life too, advising him on his conversion from engineering to biology, and supervising his (uncompleted) PhD. Both men seem to have a considerable track record of writing comic verse, so this little volume is entirely fitting.

I was reading Mary Barton (1848) by Elizabeth Gaskell, a rather grim Victorian novel, based in Manchester at a time of economic depression. In the book she referred to how learned the working men of Manchester could be. For example, one of her characters, Job Legh, had a particular interest in natural history and had built up a collection of specimens from around the world. It was no surprise then the next day when a small volume entitled Science Lectures for the People: science lectures delivered in Manchester grabbed my attention whilst I was looking around the collections. Given that it was on the same day as one of our history of science lectures, it seemed the topic had chosen me.

In total the library has 5 volumes which between them cover each series of lectures that were held from 1866 to 1879. In fact they had begun life some years earlier during the cotton famine in 1862 as a way of entertaining unemployed mill and factory workers, but we do not have any copies of the earlier lectures in our collections.

The lectures covered topics that were designed to give both a basic introduction to scientific concepts and appeal to the ‘working’ man. The lectures had titles that included, ‘Coral and coral reefs’, ‘The temperature and life of the deep sea’ and ‘How coal and the strata in which it is found is formed’. In fact coal featured regularly throughout the course of the lectures.  The lectures were largely organised by Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe FRS, and he delivered many of them himself but he was far from being the only Royal Society fellow to have been involved. Other fellows included William Huggins, Joseph Norman Lockyer, Thomas Henry Huxley and John Tyndall who requested a ‘glass of good dry champagne at dinner’ as it was ‘important for the well-being of my brain during the lecture’, making him my personal favourite of the lecturers.

As Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe was the driving force behind these lectures, I thought I’d better find out a little more about him. Born in Liverpool in 1833, he completed his initial degree at UCL in 1853. He briefly moved to Germany, where he worked with Robert Bunsen (yes, he of Bunsen burner fame) before returning to England in 1856, moving to Manchester in 1857. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1863 on the strength of his chemical work, but it was his continued dedication to teaching science that really struck me. Apart from organising the lectures he was Chair of Chemistry at Owens College, Manchester (which evolved into the University of Manchester) and he also founded a working mens’ college in the city. I think this is a legacy anyone could be proud of.

I have enjoyed reading about the lectures, but for me personally researching the life and character of Sir Henry has been the most interesting part of my first blog post. I expect to come across many more fascinating fellows during my time at the Royal Society and perhaps they too will feature on our blog.

Biographical Memoirs has been in publication since 1955, and before that the Obituary Notices were published from 1932 – further information and links to the content of the obituaries can be found on the Biog.Mems. website. Prior to 1932, “Obituary notices of deceased Fellows” were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, but by this stage my curiosity was well-and-truly-piqued as these seem to have just started for no apparent reason.

I was already aware that announcing the names of Fellows who had died over the past year was a custom honoured annually at the Anniversary Meetings of the Society, but I hadn’t realised that this had been going on since 1743. The minutes of the meeting on 30^th November 1743 record that the then President, Martin Folkes, announced that it would be appropriate to record the Fellows who had died each year and to read out the list at the Anniversary Meeting, and this has been done ever since.

I don’t know whether the mid 1700s were a time of particular preoccupation with this sort of thing, but I was most interested to discover in his history of the early years of the Royal Society (published in 1756), Thomas Birch records a number of obituaries of Fellows who died between 1667 and 1686. These are added to the records of the November 30^th meetings and provide a reasonable amount of biographical detail about their subjects, although Birch doesn’t record whether these are the only Fellows who died in these years. Most significantly, none of these deaths are so much as noted in the minute books of the time, so it seems that that Birch must have been sufficiently interested to research them himself.

During his time as president of the Royal Society(1820-1827), Humphry Davy seems to have been responsible for instigating the practice of producing longer obituaries, as the following extract from the minutes of the meeting on November 30^th 1822 demonstrates. Having read out the list of names of deceased Fellows, he continued:

“In perusing this list Gentlemen (of deaths) some names have arrested my attention with respect to which I consider it as a duty to say a few words. I cannot enter upon a studied eulogy of the merits of the illustrious dead; but I am sure you will not consider a short tribute of respect to their memory, such as naturally arises out of this occasion, improper or out of place, and which however unequal it may be to their merits, will, I trust, be in unison with the feelings of the Society.” [JBO/43/494]

It was customary for the President to address the anniversary meeting at some length, and for the remainder of his presidency Davy began his speech with the same theme. His successor, Davies Gilbert (PRS 1827-1830), followed suit, and Gilbert’s final Anniversary Address as President, delivered in 1830, is also published in the Proceedings. Regular publication of the annual presidential addresses seems to have begun around 1840, although I haven’t found any definitive indication of why 1854 was the year in which the biographical notices became a separate entity.

Looking through the Proceedings, it seems that the biographical notices began to become separated out from the main anniversary address during the Presidency of the Earl of Rosse (1848-1854), and by this stage Davy’s personal approach had been replaced by a more formal style of obituary. I wonder if the Earl even prepared them himself, or whether one of the secretaries was charged with doing this. There is certainly some evidence that the responsibility for preparing these obituaries was not always taken by the President himself, as a footnote to the minutes of 30^th November 1841 records:

“The vice President in the chair then called upon Dr Roget, the senior secretary, to read to the meeting the biographical memoirs which he had written of some of the Fellows lately deceased, which were read accordingly. The thanks of the meeting were given to Dr Roget for having drawn up these biographical notices, which were ordered to be printed.” [JBO/48/755]

Although Davies Gilbert apparently tried to say something about all the Fellows who had passed away in 1827, this seems to have been the only time this was attempted, and in 1829 he spoke about only Woolaston, Young and Davy. Like Davy himself, he may have realised that doing justice to everyone was impossible, and this selective approach began a trend continued by their successors – for example in 1854 there were 34 deaths recorded over the previous year, but only 7 of them received obituary notices in the Proceedings.

Currently Biographical Memoirs tends to feature around 20 obituaries each year, although as these tend to be quite in-depth accounts the subjects may have been deceased for slightly longer than a year by the time of publication. Taken cumulatively they form a fascinating collection of accounts of some extraordinary lives, and I find them quite inspiring.

As you may have guessed from the name, UK1 was the first in a series of science satellites (6 in total), which were designed to carry experiments devised by UK universities  (for example measuring solar radiation and charged particles in the upper atmosphere). The project was decidedly international – UK1 and UK2 were built in the USA (though 3-6 were built in the UK), and the satellites were launched by the American Thor-Delta rocket. That notwithstanding, the Ariel 1 mission signalled the start of the British presence in space, and the UK thereby took its place as the third space-faring nation. Sadly Ariel’s mission was a fairly short-lived success, as later the same year a high-altitude nuclear test explosion interfered with its signal.

Our model is suspended in a light-well in the centre of the Royal Society’s building, although I’m afraid this is in a staff-only area so opportunities for the public to see it are few and far between. I particularly like this photo as it includes both the satellite and the crew of the Atlantis space shuttle (taken when the astronauts visited the Royal Society in 2010).

In case you’re interested to know more, the Science Museum currently has a special exhibition devoted to 50 years of the UK in space, and Ariel 1 features in an article by Alok Jha in today’s Guardian too. And finally, the moment I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for – some technical information about the satellite itself:

Launch date: 26 April 1962
Launch vehicle: Thor-Delta
Weight: 60kg
Diameter (body): 0.56m
Total boom span: 3m
Orbit: 389km x 1214km
Stabilisation: spin at 36.6rpm

I’ve always thought that the Society’s portrait of the surgeon John Hunter (1728-1793) is one of those pictures which are eye-catching for the wrong reasons. The very large dog resting its head on Hunter’s knee isn’t an obvious breed and seems badly painted, but that’s probably a disservice to the artist Robert Home. Hunter was well-known for experimenting with cross-breeding and there is a possibility that this may be one of Hunter’s wolf-dog hybrids. If so, the poor creature came to a sticky end, as many of Hunter’s dogs did, but in this case at the hands of a vigilante dangerous dog mob rather than by dissection.

By contrast, the naturalist and occasional phrenologist Thomas Ignatius Maria Forster (1789-1860) took his love of pet dogs to opposite extremes. Forster never became a Fellow of the Royal Society, although he moved in Sir Joseph Banks’s circle and married Julia, the daughter of Henry Beaufoy FRS. He  would later live and travel in Europe, usually with a pet dog in tow. His love of animals made Forster noteworthy as pioneering vegetarian and he likely influenced his acquaintance, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), in this regard. Forster wrote obituaries for many of his pets and described their virtues in rhyme. One portrait print in our collection shows Forster with the companion for whom he composed Inscription for the tomb of my old dog Shargs, commencing:

Beneath these trees I’ve buried my old dog,
Who, nine years by my side was wont to jog,
With him I loved the weary day to spend,
My brother mortal and my only friend.
But now his tongue is mute, his bones are old.
His nerves are quiet and his blood is cold.

It was, admittedly, a one-way exchange with Shelley.

Charles Darwin thought deeply about selective breeding for particular traits in dogs, pigeons and other creatures in the course of his On the Origins of Species (1859) and in later works such as the Descent of Man (1871). Spouting verse wasn’t one of them, but his protégée John Lubbock (1834-1913) attempted to judge intelligence by basic communication with dogs. In his book On the senses, instincts and intelligence of animals…(1888) Lubbock related how his black poodle Van was trained to ‘read’ words on cards associated with particular objects. Cue correspondence from dog-lovers, eager to share with the longsuffering scientist details of how smart their pets were. “My little dog, a long-haired scotch Terrier has quite succeeded in learning to distinguish colours”, wrote one; “of course he sometimes is careless and makes mistakes.”

This was nothing compared to the talents of Duffer the counting dog, whose owner related that,  in return for a biscuit, the untrained Dandie Dinmont would bark numbers up to ten on request. So far plausible? Well, Duffer could also subtract and multiply, “but he got tired and confused as the figures mounted up” (I sympathize). His owner “then told him a few simple historical facts upon which he might be able to answer numerically, such as How many wives had Henry VIII or How many King George’s were there? These he invariably answered correctly.”

Before I’m tempted to install Duffer as a posthumous honorary researcher in our history centre, there’s a nagging doubt about that biscuit reward and paying attention to visual cues. Dogs have been around people a long time, after all, and it’s not for our cultural conversation.

Pictures have been catalogued to include detailed descriptions and provenance information; they have also, in many cases, been digitised for the first time.

The website is freely available for all to view and we hope it will prove a valuable tool for academic research. The resource also offers an image licensing service enabling users to purchase rights to reproduce the images in books, journals and many other mediums. Proceeds from image reproduction fees will be put towards conserving and developing our collections.

You can find more information about the pictures and services offered on the ‘About us’ page. You may also want to take a look at the help notes to get you started. But if you have any questions or queries on how to use the website then do drop us a line, we’ll be happy to hear from you.

We hope you enjoy browsing the website, please spread the word to your friends and colleagues. We will continue to add pictures regularly, so keep checking back to see what’s new.

The Austrian microscopist and illustrator Franz Bauer produced a series of images of the development of chicken embryos, which were printed in the Philosophical Transactions in 1822 accompanying Everard Home’s paper “Observations on the changes the egg undergoes during incubation in the common fowl“. Even if you don’t feel like reading the text I’d encourage you to scroll to the last few pages of the article, as the black-and-white engravings are quite exquisite. Even more beautiful (in my opinion, at least) are Bauer’s original drawings. These are all available on our new picture database, but this one is a particular favourite of mine:

The work of Marcello Malpighi is briefly referred to at the beginning of Home’s paper. Malpighi conducted pioneering work in microscopic anatomy, building on research carried out by William Harvey. Amongst many other things, Malpighi also studied the development of chicken embryos, and the Royal Society’s collection contains both manuscript and printed copies of his “Dissertatio epistolica de formatione pulli in ovo” of 1673. Also a skilled artist, this is one of the drawings Malpighi prepared for the book:

As with the Bauer illustrations, more of Malpighi’s drawings can be seen online, and you can read more about some of Malpighi’s work in this blog post. If you’re interested to learn more about the development of chicken embryos, this fantastic web resource from the University of New South Wales is just the place to look.