Category: Past to Present

Charles Lyell and the Sowerbys

Imagine this: Charles Lyell sitting with his friend George Brettingham Sowerby discussing and identifying fossils from Lyell’s last adventure whilst in a pair of plushy armchairs drinking tea. It is not known whether this is the case, but for me it is what immediately springs to mind when finding comments and identifications made by G.B. Sowerby which have been written on the back of display tablets. Some of these identifications seem to be in the handwriting of G.B. Sowerby himself. Whether this was G.B. Sowerby the elder or the younger remains to be discovered.

Research on the Lyell Collection has revealed that G.B. Sowerby identified nearly 3,500 fossils for or with Charles Lyell, mainly between 1839 and 1841. These were mainly gastropods (snails) and bivalves (clams, mussels, and scallops). The majority were from France, but it seems Lyell called upon him to assist with identifications from many other localities.

Now this is all well and good but if you are anything like me you will be wondering “well who were The Sowerbys?”  Read on to find out what is interesting and extraordinary about them.

The Sowerbys contributed massively to the field of natural history in many different disciplines. 14 members of the Sowerby family wrote and or illustrated over 100 works on botany, mineralogy, palaeontology, and zoology. They worked with or for most of the great names of natural history in the 19^th century, including Charles Darwin.

James Sowerby was the man who started it all. Father to 9 children including James de Carle and George Brettingham I. James Sowerby was a naturalist and an illustrator. He had black eyes and was told by his mother that all the girls would die for him. He couldn’t see how he would kill with his eyes or make girls hearts ache, and so decided that he was in fact ugly, concluding that all the talks of heartaches and killings were untrue. James recognised himself as a genius, titling his childhood reminiscences ‘Myself or the progress of a genious’ (his spelling). He produced not only his well-known work on plants (English Botany) but also works on mycology (the study of fungi), conchology (the study of mollusc shells), and mineralogy.

James de Carle Sowerby, the eldest son, was a mineralogist and illustrator. He studied experimental and analytical chemistry under Humphry Davy, and had the honour of assisting Davy with his experiments. James de Carle proposed classifying minerals according to their chemical composition, and by the age of 20 had named and arranged the collections of the Marchioness of Bath and other amateur collectors.

George Brettingham Sowerby I was a naturalist, illustrator, and conchologist. He became estranged from his family, with his name not appearing on family publications after 1822, and set up his own establishment working with natural history specimens. His son, George Brettingham II, was taken on by Charles Lyell in 1843 as his aid when in the USA. The name was passed down for 6 generations.

Charlotte Caroline Sowerby was the only daughter of George Brettingham I. She was a natural history illustrator with her high quality images present in The Illustrated Bouquet. Not only did she create botanical images she also illustrated a quartz crystal with asbestos inclusions, and volcanoes, proving it wasn’t just the men of the family who did the work!

Getting the picture

Photographing museum specimens is an important part of the documentation process. It creates a record of the condition of the object at a particular point in time, and may reduce the need for long descriptions of the specimen and associated material  such as labels. Making pictures available online also provides an exciting new window into the behind-the-scenes collections. There’s recently  been a big drive in the museums sector towards mass digitisation, and our museum is moving towards that model. The important thing for us is to balance speed with  the need to produce photographs that are both useful and appealing to our audiences.

I’ve taken many different types of photos over the course of the Lyell Project, trying out different ways of creating the best image to illustrate a blog post, record an entire drawer or capture different types of handwriting. It’s been a useful but time-consuming process. We are now moving on to the mass digitisation part of the project, and I’ve spent  much of the past few weeks experimenting with various ways of doing this.  My aim is to get the entire process of photography, from getting out the specimens to uploading the images, to work more smoothly, making everything faster and more efficient.

The equipment I’m using was already in the museum, purchased during various projects and using different funding sources:

• Camera: Canon EOS 6D (the specification is probably overkill for these photos)
• Lens: EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
• Copy stand: Kaiser RS1 copy stand
• Lights: Kaiser RB30 lights
• Scale bar
• Basic laptop
• Software: DSLR Remote Pro (remote capture application for camera)
• Cable with USB type A plug to mini-B plug to connect the camera to the laptop
• Paint brush to dust specimen and clean background
• White paper for background
• Stiff white card reflector to reduce shadows

For rapid photography, the big advantage of the Lyell Collection is that around 95% of the specimens are attached to wooden or cardboard tablets, many of which are the same width. We want to capture images of the entire tablet as that provides useful information about the specimen, including the object number, locality, genus and species. As the specimens are already fixed to the tablets, there was no need to go through the time-consuming and fiddly process of orientating every specimen in the same way and keeping it in position using props. The only decision was which way up to photograph the tablet. As you can see from the photos below, there is very little consistency to the orientation of the fossils on the tablets, so we decided to go with standard paleontological orientations e.g. apex up for gastropods or, where there was a mixture of ways up, to go with the orientation of  handwriting.

I was surprised how quickly I could take photos of the specimens when I left the camera at a fixed height above the specimens and used autofocus, instead of adjusting the working distance and manually focusing for every specimen. Only the very smallest shells (less than 1cm) looked a bit flat, and there was still enough of the shape recorded to be useful.

I’ve done three drawers about 250 specimens so far and I’ve got down to approximately 2 minutes per specimen. This includes the whole process from getting drawers out of the cabinets, photographing all the specimens, manually renaming the images with the specimen number, doing basic image adjustments to the RAW files, saving as archival tiffs (5472 x 3648 pixels), and jpegs (1000 x 667 pixels) for online use, editing metadata, and uploading to our collections management system and digital archives.  Other demands of the project mean that I won’t be doing this full time, but I’ll probably be be doing a day or two of photography per week for the rest of the project.

This process will slow down considerably as we get to less uniform drawers of specimens and specimens that aren’t on tablets, but it is really useful to know how much we can do with limited equipment. In the future we may look at automating some of these processes. We’ve just been joined by a Museum Studies student who’ll be on placement with us for the next eight weeks. She’ll be working on all aspects of the Lyell project including photography, and simplifying the photography procedure in this way should make the training much easier and allow her to achieve much more in a short period of time.

 

 

 

Different Hands

Most of Lyell’s specimens are mounted on wooden tablets like the one pictured above. The glue used for mounting the specimens has failed in some cases so the fossils are loose. This means we have to be very careful moving them, for example if we want to see what’s written on the back.

The faded ink writing on the front of the tablet gives the identification “Cardita rudis” and the locality “Touraine”, a historical province in the north east of France. We think that this writing and the pencil on the back may belong to Charles Lyell based on comparison with some of his letters, but we aren’t sure. We do know that the black ink numbers were added to the tablets by Paul Clasby, the Honorary Associate who catalogued the collection in the 1980s and 1990s.

Although it gives the same information, the writing in ink on the back of the tablet seems completely different to Lyell’s, and the slope of the letters suggests that the writer may have been left handed. The layout suggests that the ink writing came first and the pencil was added later, which means Lyell may not have been the person to originally identify the specimen.

We’ve come across a few cases where people working with Lyell helped label fossils (for example the fossil bryozoans annotated by Lonsdale on this page from the Natural History Museum). There is also some indication that one of Lyell’s sisters labelled some specimens held at the University of Dundee.

Some of our unmounted Lyell fossils have distinctive labels from previous owners, but the fact that these Cardita specimens are mounted on the standard Lyell tablet suggests that the ink writing on the back is not that of an original collector. As we continue to work through the collection we hope to work out the identities of some of the other people associated with it and the role they played.