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

Used with permission

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

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

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: