Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Christopher Wren's first major commission. Today the building still
serves as a museum, where it houses the collections relating to the
history of science: there amongst the displays you can find Lewis
Carroll's camera and Albert Einstein's blackboard. The impressive
entrance to the Old Ashmolean Museum is flanked by paired
Corinthian columns and reached by a number of steps cut in
Portland Limestone from southern England. The surrounding wall is
protected by busts of four Roman emperors, with a further thirteen
surrounding the Sheldonian. These are occasionally misidentified by
mathematically challenged tourists as representing the twelve disci-
ples. One can imagine Lhwyd's excitement when he entered the doors
on his first day to help out Plot, and later as a paid employee of the
University. Once inside the building, he would have made his way to
the upper floor exhibition galleries where he might have found Plot
poring and puzzling over some petrifactions, or the collections of the
Tradescants father and son, or of Elias Ashmole. Later, on his induc-
tion tour, he would have stepped inside the ground floor lecture thea-
tre and perhaps measured his height against the lectern, before
descending beneath ground level to the basement laboratory, which
was equipped with fancy chemical apparatus. These rooms would in
time become a second home to him, even though he kept a home a
number of miles outside the city at Eynsham.
Robert Plot (1640-1696) was a Kent-born naturalist and chemist
who was appointed first Keeper of the Ashmolean in 1683. Today
much of his fame, or infamy, lies in his authorship of two volumes
of observations on natural history and antiquities. His first topic The
Natural History of Oxfordshire was published in 1677 while his sec-
ond The Natural History of Staffordshire appeared nine years later in
1686. He was, by all accounts (and there are not many), a rather odd
man, but nevertheless a good and careful curator. However, in 1690, at
the height of his fame he resigned his chair and keepership citing the
low salary as good reason for leaving: it was better, he said, to do
something rather than sitting around doing nothing for nothing. He
retired with his new wife to Sutton Barne, where he had property, but
