‘The cabinet, which Merrill classifies as a “small-scale museum”, and the microscope become metaphors for ways of looking at nature, since both make an exhibit out of nature. Both the objects in a museum and those under a microscope emphasize particularity, but this particularity also suggests panorama. The cabinet’s panorama consists in the meaning created by the juxtaposition of objects. Even the choice of specimens and their framing in a restricted area creates a new little world which reverberates with possibilities of the larger world. The microscope also presents a new world whose panorama is revealed within the world opened up by the lens. With the physical eye catered to by the microscope (this instrument became comparatively inexpensive by 1830), and the ever-increasing number of museums, no wonder the imaginative eye of Victorian writers became enamored with natural history.’

Martha Westwater, Modern Philology, 88 (1990), pp. 215-218

‘The importance of both stems from the fact that radiolaria and planktonic foraminifera live at or near the ocean surface and their shells incorporate a record of surface-water conditions as they grow. But it is the calcareous sediments, formed by the rain of dead planktonic foraminifera through the abyss, that have traditionally formed the backbone of climatic and oceanographic research.’

Richard Corfield, The Silent Landscape: In the Wake of HMS Challenger 1872-1876, London: John Murray, 2004, p.135

http://www.thepoetryhouse.org/PHProjects/Project7/project7.html

and mine will be soon available on the main Small Worlds website.

Marina Benjamin, ‘Sliding Scales: Microphotography and the Victorian Obsession with the Minuscule’, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow (eds), Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, pp. 99–122.

quoting

Philip Henry Gosse, ‘Evenings at the Microscope’ London: SPCK, 1877.

Colin Tudge says this:

“Indeed, whereas taxonomists once recognised just two kingdoms of eukaryotes (animals and plants) or three (animals, plants, and fungi), or four (animals, plants, fungi and ‘protoctists’), some modern biologists now acknowledge 20 kingdoms or more, and most of these are protists. Our own kingdom, the Animalia, has thus been dramatically demoted: from a conceptual 50 per cent of the whole to less than 5 per cent. Thus humans have been driven from the centre of the biological stage just as the astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo shifted planet Earth from the centre of the Universe.”

Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life, Oxford: OUP, 2000, p.128

Welcome to the Small Worlds commonplace book.

This is a kind of scrapbook in which the Small Worlds collaborators are going to share various quotes, images and links that we discover as we create the Small Worlds exhbition.

So, coming soon: more content!