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IT ALSO CAME FROM THE STORES
By Mark Carnall, on 14 December 2011
Number 2 in an occasional series highlighting objects from the stores. The first one is here. Hmmmm, I may need to rethink the title for these posts as after IT STILL COMES FROM THE STORES and IT DIDN’T NOT COME FROM THE STORES it might be hard to come up with the next title.
Just a quick one today reflecting on the kinds of questions that objects provoke curators to ask of the collections they look after. I’ve been working with our documentation assistant on the spirit collection and I found this curious unidentified object:
Here are the questions that first popped into my head. It is round so what round things do we find in nature? Testicles, tumours, echinoderms, eggs, eyes, inflated pufferfish, some stones, animals curled up (trilobites, hedgehogs, woodlice) and various organs. It didn’t look like any of these. On closer inspection and in conference with museum assistant Emma we unanimously decided it was a plum. This finding solicited a new series of questions. Why does the Grant Museum of Zoology have a preserved plum? Who decided to preserve this plum and why? Is this plum perhaps taken from the inside of an animal (including possibly a former curator)? Was this preserved as part of an experiment? Was it perhaps a plum that Charles Darwin or Robert Grant had almost eaten? Was it preserved as a hoax? Dissatisfyingly, we probably won’t find the answers to many of these questions.
About a week later I was struck by the question how did it get in the jar?
12 Responses to “IT ALSO CAME FROM THE STORES”
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Daniel Morse wrote on 14 December 2011:
Does it possibly have a gall wasp or similar inside? Perhaps the “Insect Inside” sticker fell off.
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Mark Carnall wrote on 14 December 2011:
That’s a good idea Daniel but there’s no holes, blemishes or lumps on the surface.
Also, I imagine if it did have something interesting inside it, it wouldn’t have been put in a jar it is impossible to get the specimen out of.
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Paul Varotsis wrote on 15 December 2011:
I suspect it grew in the jar, in a similar fashion as pear grow in bottles of pear liqueur here is an example http://www.distillerie-meyer.fr/_distillerie/liqueur-poire-william/liqueur-poire-william.html
Have you smelled the liquid? Have you tasted it?
Maybe a curator who liked plum spirit brought it back from a trip? -
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Dominic Stiles wrote on 15 December 2011:
You could empty out the preservative, test what it is & if it has any organic residue, then having had a clear view of the contents & if for example there is a bore hole, refill with a new preservative of the same type.
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Guy wrote on 5 August 2014:
Sound like an old bottle of homemade plum liqueur forgotten (hidden ?) by someone…
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Esta vieja botella de bebida no tiene valor histórico, pero es parte de la colección permanente de un museo – Media es wrote on 23 March 2018:
[…] año fue 2011, y un comisario en el Grant Museum of Zoology del University College London miraba fijamente una botella de vidrio […]
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This Old Bottle Of Booze Has No Historic Value, But It's Part Of A Museum's Permanent Collection Anyway – World News Standard wrote on 23 March 2018:
[…] year was 2011, and a curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London was staring intently at a glass bottle […]
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How A Bottle Of Booze With No Historical Value Wound Up In A Museum – HabariCloud wrote on 19 May 2018:
[…] year was 2011, and a curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London was staring intently at a glass bottle […]
Must have been a prune when it went in…