Skip to content

OU on the BBC: World In A Box - Featured Collections

View a list of the collections shown in the programme in featured collections.

07 Nov
2005
Used with permission British Museum

Listed below are the items from 17th/18th century collections which appeared in the programme, plus the collections in which they reside. Many of these are available for public viewing - contact the museums for availability and opening times.

The British Museum: Sloane Collection
• Grey’s Inn hand axe
• Oliver Cromwell’s death mask
• Sloane Astrolabe
• Terracotta bust of Sloane by John Rysbrack
• Wooden statuette of Mercury
• Mother-of-pearl shell with Buddha Pearls
• Oriental carved hornbill beak
• Wampum beads
• Indian vomiting stick
• 'Penis sheath' with label added by Sloane
• Thunderbird pouch, with corresponding watercolour image by Sarah Stone in her album of paintings from the Leverian collection
• Watercolour by Sarah Stone of the Leverian Museum
• Seal decoy hat – collected by Captain Cook
• Whaling hat – collected by Captain Cook

The Natural History Museum, London: Sloane Collection
• Engraved Nautilus shell
• Glove woven from the beard of a mollusc
• Preserved specimens in bottles
• Sloane/Petiver butterfly collection
• Sloane Herbarium – cocoa specimen

 
Production team Museum Exhibit

The Royal College of Surgeons of England: Hunterian Collection
• Conjoined parasitic skull of a 'boy from Bengal'
• Two headed calf skull
• Two tailed lizard
• Hunter’s preparation of a diseased heart
• Hunter’s chicken leg experiment, preparation
• Human veins mounted on boards - belonged to John Evelyn, then the Royal Society Repository

The Victoria and Albert Museum
• Three European collectors' cabinets

The Geffrye Museum
• John Evelyn’s collecting cabinet

The Tate Britain
• The Yarmouth painting - painting of the Paston Family Collection, Dutch School (on loan from the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery)

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History: Tradescant Collection
• Dodo bones
• Garpike specimen from North America
• Crocodile head
• Toucan skull
• Hornbill skull
• Elephant bones

 
BBC keyboard

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: The Tradescant Collection
• Russian bead calculator
• Carved portraits on plum stones
• Henry VIII’s hawking glove
• 'Powhatan's Mantle'

Canterbury Cathedral: The Bargrave Collection
• Miniature portrait of Bargrave, on copper
• Roman glass phial/Lacrymatory
• Bronze figure of Leda and the Swan (Renaissance copy of Roman)
• Roman lamp
• Reclining nude carved on coral
• Preserved finger of a Frenchman
• Turned model of a human eye in 14 pieces.

The Royal Society, London: Repository Collection
• Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge: The Woodwardian Collection
• Collection is of geological specimens and fossils, housed in their original cabinets.

Museum of Garden History, London
• Catalogue of the Tradescant Collection
• Vegetable lamb, strange mythical animal

Queens' College, Cambridge: The Vigani Cabinet
• Complete surviving early 18th century medical cabinet – drawer of pigments.

Westminster Abbey Museum
• Duchess of Richmond’s Parrot

World In A Box in more depth:

Rate and share this page:

You haven't rated. Average rating 5 out of 5, based on 1 rating

Share this page:

.

More like this

Comments

Be the first to post a comment.

Login or Register to post comments

Article Information

Publication details

Copyright information
• Body text - Copyrighted: The Open University
• Image 'British Museum' - Copyrighted: Used with permission
• Image 'Museum Exhibit' - Copyrighted: Production team
• Image 'keyboard' - Copyrighted: BBC

Article Feeds

If you enjoyed this, why not follow a feed to find out when we have new things like it? Choose an RSS feed from the list below. (Don't know what to do with RSS feeds?)
Remember, you can also make your own, personal feed by combining tags from around OpenLearn.

About OpenLearn

Hide

Explore

Try

Study

OU Courses

Open University

OpenLearn Now

Hide
Dickens: Want some more? Copyrighted Image iStock

Delve into the world of Dickens on his bicentenary.

Tag Clouds

Hide

My Cloud

Discover the latest about your passions - Sign In or Register and start a personal tag cloud.

What are Tag Clouds?
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/flash/tagcloud.swf

Creative Commons License Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, content on this site is made available
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

/openlearn/sites/all/themes/ole/