Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 100. (Budapest 2008)
Bálint, Zs.: Lepidoptera collections of historical importance in the Hungarian Natural History Museum
During almost one and a half century the FRIVALDSZKY collection has almost completely disappeared in the HNHM Lepidoptera collection, and a great effort is needed to secure the specimens that can be still located. This is not an easy task as at present the HNHM Lepidoptera collection possesses approximately 1.7 million pinned specimens, which are kept in 12 thousand standard museum drawers. GENERAL REMARKS The Lepidoptera collections of historical importance in the HNHM showed the way how naturalists started to explore biodiversity, and how they develope the collections building techniques and curatorial practices to gain better science. In this development there were clearly two trends: the diminishing baroque era and the enlightened modern one. TOBIAS KOY, with ESPER and GERNING belonged to the generation of naturalists whose collections were maintained still in the "tradition of curiosities", in a superfluous baroque manner. The KOY collection, which was built in the spirit having curiosities, served specimens for people active as scientists describing the taxonomic composition of the Earth's biota. Probably the idols of KOY were such personalities like ALBERT SEBA (1665-1736), whose grand collection of natural curiosity was well known by the great naturalists in the 18-19 TH centuries like LlNNEAUS and PlETER CRAMER (1721-1779) (BÁLINT & GOODGER2003), and the grand Thesaurus of the SEBA collection was used as a source of material (SEBA 2005). OCHSENHEIMER and TREITSCHKE represented the new wave of scientists who started to base their work strictly on material, which served as records of distribution and taxonomic variability. Therefore they possessed not only a single specimen of a species as curiosity, but series of specimens which represents the same taxon. Like CRAMER and LINNAEUS they applied the techniques of pinning specimens having voluminous material in pins, which allowed them to study repeatedly small details of the body structures and wing patterns. Every individual specimen was labelled having a combination of numbers, which provided the information about the taxonomic identity and provenance of the specimen via a catalogue. This labelling tradition was kept until the turn of the 19-20 TH centuries in the main European museums, when so much material arrived in the collections, that it was impossible to follow (BÁLINT & NGUYEN 2006).
