| Administrative History | From its earliest days, the Geological Society collected specimens. Unlike rival collections at the British Museum and other learned bodies, the Society's Museum was intended to be comprehensive. Access was restricted to members of the Society but it was to be of use to both beginners and accomplished geologists. The rudimentary Museum was first laid out in 1809, when the Society moved to its first premises at 4 Garden Court, Temple. However even after the move to a larger house in Lincoln's Inn Fields a year later there was still not enough space to adequately store the specimens.
By 1810 the Museum was in disarray, with new specimens piling up and the existing collection still not catalogued fully. At the first meeting of Council, 14 June 1810, it was resolved that Leonard Horner, Wilson Lowry, Comte de Bournon and Peter Mark Roget would form a 'Committee of Arrangement' to take charge of the collection. In 1812 it was decided to appoint the Society's first paid member of staff, Thomas Webster who had been a Member of the Society since 1809, as (part-time) Keeper of the Museum. Webster's role was not curatorial, instead he was charged with unpacking and registering the specimens which would then be catalogued by the Committee of Arrangement. Webster was overwhelmed with the workload as he also had to fit in his additional duties of secretary, librarian, journal editor as well as keeping an eye on the accounts.
Originally the fossil specimens in the Museum were arranged by country - the British specimens being then subdivided by county. From May 1813 it was ordered that part of the fossil collection be arranged stratigraphically, echoing the fossil theories of William Smith. However not all members of the Society agreed with the new layout, and Webster was caught between opposing scientific factions who continually criticised his work. His unpopularity amongst a number of senior Fellows of the Society such as George Bellas Greenough and Charles Lyell when added to the scandal of a clerk absconding with £63 from the sales of the 'Transactions' in 1827, meant that when the remodelled post of 'Curator' was created that year with Webster in mind, he was not appointed. Instead Webster resigned on 1 July 1827, later referring to the Society's officers as 'a bad lot'.
Instead the first Curator in 1829 was William Lonsdale. Like Webster, Lonsdale also acted as assistant secretary, editor, librarian and finance officer but at least was employed full time. Lonsdale's appointment was viewed by all as a great success, however when his health broke down from overwork in 1836, he was relieved from his curatorial duties. Between 1839 and 1848 there followed five Curators but this high turnover of staff meant that much of the work was either unfocused or unfinished. In order to try and sort out the ongoing problems in the Museum, various ad hoc Special Museum Committees were formed. Leonard Horner, under the aegis of one of these Special Committees finally managed to get the Museum under some sort of control by the early 1860s but this happy state of affairs was short lived.
By 1869, it was decided to abandon attempts to form a comprehensive collection. Instead specimens should directly relate to papers read at the Society, resulting in a virtual halt in donations of any kind. The move to Burlington House gave the impetus to thoroughly weed and catalogue the collection again, but after Bernard B Woodward who had overseen the relocation resigned in 1876, the collection received only cursory attention.
In 1895, the Council accepted that a large portion of the collection should be donated to the British Museum but the decision was indefinitely postponed after a special general meeting the following year. However another special general meeting was called by a group of palaeontologists in 1901 to try and force the Council to take better care of the Museum, but their plan backfired and instead a motion was carried that the Museum should be disposed of. This caused a flurry of interest in the Museum, with a threefold increase in visitors and loan requests. John Frederick Blake even produced a catalogue of the whole Museum, published at his own expense as 'List of the Types and Figured Specimens...in the Collection of the Geological Society of London', London (1902).
Finally, after another two special general meetings held on 25 January and 14 June 1911, it was resolved that the Museum should be disposed of and the space used by the Library. The contents were divided between the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum) and the Museum of Practical Geology (part of the British Geological Survey). The British Museum received the foreign specimens, while the domestic collection was given to the other institution. A number of specimens were initially retained by the Society, but following the reduction of display space in the Upper Library due to the installation of additional book shelves in 1936, many of the remaining specimens were offered to the two institutions again. Only a few specimens remain, notably the ichthyosaur skull found by Mary Anning in Lyme Regis (now in the entrance lobby of the Society's Apartments) and a Pleistocene rhinoceros skull [Rhinoceros tichorhinus] given by Henry Warburton in December 1820. The Museum space became the Upper Library, but some of the supports for the specimen drawers can still be seen on a number of its shelves. |