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Description: | Dr William Hunter, the founder of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, had an extensive collection of zoological specimens. In the Zoology collections today, apart from the important Entomology collection written about in a separate entry, we can identify corals, shells, deer antlers, a stuffed bird, elephant tusks and a guinea worm as having come from the original Hunter collection. A near contemporary account (James Laskey's An Account of the Hunterian Museum
'1813) lists many hundreds of specimens from various phyla, and in many forms - taxidermy, bones, wet preserved, dried etc. Undoubtedly specimens decayed and were discarded over the last 250 years and some specimens have been merged into the general zoological collections. Research is undertaken to re-establish their identity.
William Hunter was acquainted with many of the leading scientific figures of the day, including Sir Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, John Ellis and John Fothergill. The twenty extant Ellis and Solander corals are very important specimens: Hunter acquired them from Fothergill who in turn had, in part at least, got them from Sydney Parkinson, the artist on the first Cook voyage to the South Seas and on which Banks and Solander had sailed as naturalists. The true nature of corals was not known at that time with many people believing they were plants. Ellis and Solander studied them and produced the first published scientific account establishing that corals are animals.
Hunter opened his collections to others for systematic study. His personal zoological interests were tied to exploring philosophical or practical questions. For example he was interested in the then controversial subject of evolution and extinction. He carried out studies comparing the Giant Irish deer and moose, and the mastodon and modern elephants to understand their form and function and thereby provided evidence for his view that extinction had occurred.
There are a number of animal specimens included in the medical collections as comparative anatomical material. For example William and his brother John, another famous 18th century doctor, studied the seasonality of breeding in birds. Two wet-preserved dissected sparrows demonstrate the enlarged state of the testes in male sparrows in the springtime as breeding season commences. | Subjects: | William Hunter corals Ellis zoology Solander | Source: | Hunterian Museum | Address: | University of Glasgow,
University Avenue,
G12 8QQ | Creator: | Maggie Reilly | Contributor: | William Hunter | Identifier: | C-0056 |
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