I AM ashamed to say that I didn't visit the Natural History Museum for years, and I only went last week because of an American visitor. (Were it not for foreigners, my cultural education would be very poor in deed.) In this case, the visitor was none other than Stephen Jay Gould, snail fancier, evolutionary biologist and well known writer of popular science essays. Except that I was there, last week ... and Stephen went in 1993.
But so impressed was be the whose address is the prestigious, Agassiz Museum in Harvard, that he wrote a veritable hymn in praise of the Dublin museum. It appeared in his latest book, Dinosaur in a Haystack, and prompted me (belatedly) to get along to Merrion Square myself.
This wasn't Stephen's first visit to the Dublin museum. In the early 1970s he came to measure (of all things) the antlers of Irish elks. Though, as he explained 20 years ago in another essay, in his first collection Ever Since Darwin, this misunderstood animal was neither Irish nor an elk.
European Moose
It should, he argues, be called the giant European deer. But only the European moose or "elk" had antlers even remotely close to the giant 12 ft span of the fossil species, and the name stuck.
Pay no heed, mind, to those who say deer became extinct because their antlers were too heavy for them. The real reason is probably more prosaic, they were caught out as the climate changed to colder times, after a short warm spell that lasted a mere 1,000 years.
Back in Dublin 29 years later, Gould recalled his first visit.
"The specimens were terrific, but, oh my, the museum was a dingy place ... little light, less comfort and dust absolutely everywhere ... congealed into thick layers of grime."
Just as I remembered it too a dull place, full of stuffed aminals and with none of the excitement of science, the exuberance of Nature, though one exhibit sticks in my memory from those childhood visits a macabre series of cut away eggs showing how the embryonic chick develops to the moment of hatching.
And today? Today, Gould gives his "warmest congratulations" to a museum that has been "uplifted from squalor to glory . . . the light floods through. The dark wood of the cabinets has been repaired and polished and the glass now shines ... the ensemble exudes pride in its own countenance.
The triumph, for Gould, is a faithful restoration to the original, to the "Victorian cabinet museum". For, despite his reputation as a science populariser, he has little time for the hi tech interactive computerised scientific exhibits so popular elsewhere today.
Give him instead, a cabinet crammed full of stuffed specimens any day and let him thrill to "the raw diversity of nature". If you've to contort a few specimens to fit more in, so much the better. "O Lord, how manifold are thy works. Visit the museum and see for yourself I for one came away convinced if the value of an exhibition I had ignored for years.
Bright Airy Space
The first thing to hit you is the bright airy space. The walls have been painted a warm gold, the sun streamed in. There was a constant flow of visitors and a hum of talk, and questions parents and kids, locals in for a look, tourists. "Gee, Aaron, get a look at the antlers on that moose!" Could this be the same place? But yes, the "elks" still greet you in the foyer, hanging from the ceiling upstairs are the same massive whale skeletons, and there is the old chicken egg display, though smaller than I remembered.
The overall impression was, as Gould said it would be, of nature's wondrously variegated diversity". Are there really so many types of bird in Ireland? So many insects? 50 many kinds of mouse? Were there really lemmings here once, and lynx and hyena? There are other stunners the massive, sunfish from Lough Swilly, the puffer fish caught off Ardmore, the huge sturgeon found in the Liffey, long ribbon like parasitic worms, engorged blood filled mites.
But one small gripe why are there no women among the "famous Irish entomologists"?
Upstairs, in the international collections, is a real sense of being in a gentleman's trophy room never have I seen so many mounted heads on a wall! Here too are displays that will stop you in your tracks. The dodo and moa skeletons, the finger like bones in the whale's fin that reveal its mammalian nature, the weaver bird's wonderful nest, the piranha's tiny teeth, the turtle skeleton (I didn't know till now how the shell and backbone are fused), the frail cobra bones, and a motley collection of cousins in a cabinet a chimp, orangutan, gorilla and human skeleton side by side.
Wondrous Exhibition
But wondrous as the exhibition is and I honestly didn't expect to be wowed by a medley of old stuffed animals a "dead zoo", as a friend said it is still only part of the story.
There is little text and what's there is old. And when it comes to science, engineering and technology, there is so much more to tell, show and explain. It's fine for you, Stephen, with a wealth of science museums to chose from, but valuable though this is, it is the only one Dublin has.
In fact, Dublin is now the only European capital without a modern science centre. Does it need one? What form might it take? Where? And what role for the existing museums in any new development? All of which is under discussion this week at a major RDS conference on "Science Centres for Ireland".