Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management

preference, and authority. In some ways, they gave clues to social access.

9 As the embodiments of information, they were the representations of power. From the Enlightenment, we see a epistemic rupture: as newly discovered man-made artifacts are seen as models of reason and human behaviour, and as tools and processes became representations of a moral economy based on the idea of progress. The appearance of an industrial revolution in England, coupled with political revolution in France, brought a contemporary rupture in the private world of enclosed spaces. Historically private spaces, associated with the patronage of royalty and clerics, became public spaces, associated with the will of the people and the rights of Everyman to have access and enjoyment. In Napoleonic Europe, the very existence of museums coincided in their schemes of collection and arrangement with representations of nationalism and imperialism.

10 Among the earliest signifiers was CNAM, in the mechanical arts, and the Jardln des Plantes, with its Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, in zoology and natural history. In England, we look to the George III collection of scientific instruments, now in the Science Museum, and Sir Hans Sloan's collection of plants and ethnography that formed the basis of the British Museum, thence the Natural History Museum. At the same time, from 1790 onwards, authority, access and power spoke to intellectual hegemonies, translated by degrees into the language of space, sequence and arrangement. Natural objects were set out in the Ashmolean at Oxford, for example, following the framework of Paley's natural theology, intended to "induce a mental habit of associating the view of natural phenomema with the conviction that they are the media of Divine manifestation (and by such association to give proper dignity to every branch of natural science)".

11 Such hegemonies were reinforced by the styles of worshipful public architecture within which they were placed. Meanwhile science museums also acquired a politics from within. "Let nature speak for itself" became the watchword for a new brand of scientific objectivity, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have put it.

12 And for the moralisation of objectivity, the museum became a monument. What might be said formally to constitute any given "object", a thing to be especially valued, accessioned, described, and displayed, became a localised, specialised form of knowledge, with a comprehensive, associated language of nature. The morphological clashes between Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hiliaire, between Richard Owen and T. H. Huxley, reflect different readings of the language in which objects of nature were meant to speak - perhaps different languages altogether. That vocabulary was mediated by a clerisy, a priestcraft, who began to be called curators. With the rise of curators in the first quarter of the 19th cen-