An Irishwoman's Diary

SECRETS survive seconds in a city like Galway, but one of the best minded has to be on its university campus. A student could spend several years wandering up and down the banks of the Corrib, oblivious to the close connection with the world’s first “pop” writer of science.

I should know, for that student was me, and it wasn’t as if I had so many distractions at the time. Yet even when the EU Commissioner for Science and Research Máire Geoghegan-Quinn recently popped in to open the highly successful Galway science and technology fair, little enough was made of the Charles Darwin association.

It was while HMS Beaglewas surveying the south American coast in the early 1830s that the novice naturalist collected the specimens which are now housed in the university's Martin Ryan marine science institute. At that stage, evidence of natural selection wasn't his sole preoccupation; Darwin was most taken by geological formations and evidence of extinct species, such as the tooth of the giant sloth of megatherium that he came across in Patagonia.

The Guira cuckoo, still extant, is a social bird and clumsy flier which prefers to hop and glide. Easy prey then for a man with a notebook and net, though the bird is also known for its “strong, pungent odour”. Darwin also caught a greater grison, a member of the ferret family which lives in savannas and rainforests, along with a Patagonian cavy or mara,which burrows across central and south America, and the Azara’s fox or Azara’s “Zorro”, a “false” fox native to the pampas.

He despatched some of his specimens home in advance. Others, like his famous finches, arrived back in a "jumbled mass" without adequate notification of their precise location, according to science writer Steve Jones, author of Darwin's Island. It was thanks to clergy, doctors, former army officers and other gentry of Darwin's generation that the university now owns this particular aforementioned quartet.

The gentry were members of the Zoological Society of London “Collecting during the growth of the empire was almost a second profession,” according to Eoin MacLoughlin, the institute’s senior technical officer in zoology. In and around 1854, the society took a decision to sell part of its collection to London’s developing natural history museum.

There were two further sales – to universities in Cork and Galway respectively. It was then that NUIG, then Queen’s College, acquired four of Darwin’s many specimens. The college had opened only five years earlier, but, as MacLoughlin recalls, museums were regarded as being as important as lecture halls and laboratories for teaching purposes.

Initially, the Darwin cache was housed in the university’s quadrangle, along with samples of geology and mineralogy. The first museum committee had a purse of £100 annually, but also developed the collection with bequests and gifts from private individuals. In 1883, one Prof RJ Anderson used his extensive contacts abroad to expand the collection, and he compiled the first catalogue in 1911, some three years before his death.

The museum survived much upheaval – a world war, a rising, the War of Independence and the subsequent civil conflict. It was only in 1962 that funding began to trickle back in for research. The then natural history department was split into botany and zoology, and the quadrangle collection moved to a new building at Áras de Brún.

This latest location in the Martin Ryan institute is Galway’s smaller version of Dublin’s “dead zoo”. The exhibition ranges from “spirit” collections, preserved in alcoholic substances, such as the four-horned spider crab and common lobster, to the aesthetically conserved skeleton of a Martinique lancehead snake in its custom-built glass dome.

There are skulls a-plenty – of an albatross, a turkey, a woodpecker, a gharial and a minke whale taken from the back of the Aran Islands in the 1980s. MacLoughlin points to the bullet hole under the eye socket of the museum’s hippopotamus skull; a little clue as to how it met its end. There are examples of an anteater, a three-toed sloth, a two-toed sloth, a great hornbill toucan. The American alligator was an object of some dread among former students, who were once required to know the name of every individual bone.

Thanks to the late Prof Anderson, the museum also has its own collection of Blaschka models – stunning and intricately beautiful glass specimens made for scientific study by father and son, Leopold and Rudolf. The Blaschkas, descended from 15th-century Venetian craftworkers, are perhaps best known for the glass flowers that they made for Harvard University.

However, their marine models are equally valuable. Living in Dresden, Germany, the pair relied on zoological sketches initially but found that these were not always so accurate, MacLoughlin says. Such was their attention to detail that their later glassworks were based on preserved animals – and also on live animals housed in their studio aquarium.

MacLoughlin and colleagues are currently working on a new catalogue of the museum, which will be published shortly, just 100 years after Prof Anderson’s original version. It will complement NUIG’s own quiet quarter – not interactive, not computerised, but open daily and free to the public, and a little bit of magic all the same . . .