smaller purchases over the course of the following years." Most of these were made through
mineral dealers, chiefly through one Mr. Voight from Amsterdam. It was Voight, too, to
whom van Marum turned as soon as it became clear that the museum’s budget had been
increased significantly in 1788, instructing him to acquire whatever he considered suitable for
Teylers Museum on a journey to Hanover.100 Van Marum did so with van Zeebergh’s full
support. The trustee had even explicitly stated that van Marum “could make it clear to the said
Voight, that if he bought something of only minor interest for Teylers Museum, we [the
Teyler Foundation and van Marum] would not leave him saddled with it.”101 The trustees’
support became equally clear when they explicitly allowed van Marum to spend more than
f2000,- on geological specimens without prior consultation on his trip to London in 1790.102
So if one takes the entire period of van Marum’s tenure into account it becomes clear that
fossils - in the modem, narrow sense of the word iw e r e just one aspect of van Marum’s
collecting activities, albeit the one that received the most attention and subsequently gained
far more prominence for the simple reason that van Marum’s successors focussed almost
exclusively on fossil bones, rather than what would today be classified as minerals and rocks.
This had everything to do with the major changes in the earth sciences that were mentioned
above, and particularly the emergence of what is today denoted as palaeontology as an area of
research in its own right.
With an eye to understanding the genesis of the scientific collections at Teylers Museum and
what was ultimately put - and remained - on display in the Oval Room, it can however hardly
be stressed enough that van Mamm had a far more generalistic approach to the earth sciences
than any of his successors. In fact, even by contemporary standards his activities covered
pretty much all the subfields of the earth sciences.103 Van Marum was not, for instance, a
mineralogist in the traditional sense, who restricted his studies to the description,
classification, and analysis of specimens brought to him at the museum by others. Although
this clearly constituted a major part of van Marum’s work, he was just as clearly a believer in
the value of field studies. During his trip to Switzerland in 1802 for instance he went on
excursions to the Alps, and had himself rowed out onto a lake in order to be able to make
sketches of the mountain formations surrounding him from a greater distance, in the hope of
gaining a better understanding of their overall structure. In doing so, he revealed his
fascination not just for the surface structure of the earth (following Martin Rudwick its study
could be termed physical geography), but also for what was hidden below the surface
(geognosy, in Rudwick’s terms). This had only recently begun to interest scholars, before the
end of the 18th century it had been the reserve of mining engineers.
9 For this see: Martinus van Marum: “Journal van mijne verrichtingen ter verkrijging eener verzameling van
Fossilia in Teyler’s Museum”, 1782-1790, Flaarlem, NHA, vol. 529, Archief van Marum, nr. 1 Id.
100 Ibid., 21.11.1788.
101 “gemelden Voight konde te verstaan geeven, dat indien hij het een en ander van minder belang voor Teylers
Museum aankocht, wij er hem niet meede zouden laaten zitten [last word unreadable: rusten?].” Ibid.
102 “Directienotulen”, 18.06.1790, Haarlem, ATS, vol. 5.
1031 am following Rudwick in his distinction here: Mineralogy, physical geography & geognosy. See: Rudwick,
Bursting the Limits o f Time: The Reconstruction o f Geohistory in the Age o f Revolution, 59-132.
His belief in the importance of field studies is also reflected in his fascination with Horace-
Bénédicte de Saussure, who became the first to mount a scientific expedition to the top of
Mont Blanc in 1787. In 1799 van Marum not only purchased a large plaster model of the
Mont Blanc on which a dotted line marked de Saussure and his companions’ passage, but
some ears later he also bought a rock that Horace-Bénédicte himself had claimed to have
chipped off the very top of the French mountain.1
15. Gee, but You’re Pretty
So, as a result of van Marum’s broad definition of the earth sciences and his profound interest
in a range of issues connected with them, as well as the fact that pursuing these interests was
encouraged by the trustees, the museum’s collections include - in modem terms ^ ,a
palaeontological as well as a mineralogical collection, the latter of which was not significantly
expanded after van Mamm’s tenure.
This of course is relevant in itself to the history of Teylers Museum, but it is particularly
interesting and important with regard to the changing function of the Oval Room. This is all
the more the case because the geological collection’s heyday — during van Marum’s tenure —
coincides with the addition of laboratory premises and with the receding importance of the
electrostatic generator, which, as was mentioned above, in themselves already brought about
changes in the usage of the Oval Room.
More to the point, two facets of the work with geological specimens come to the fore here:
firstly, any systematic classification of geological specimens requires a comparison with other
specimens. On the one hand this requires that other specimens are available for such a
comparison, i.e. the size and scope of a collection as a whole becomes relevant, but at the
same time any such comparison is greatly facilitated if the collection as a whole is visually
easily accessible, i.e. if the specimens can be spread out, or already are spread out. Secondly,
many of these specimens are pleasing to the eye — precious stones are not called precious
without reason. Cherished for their aesthetic qualities, throughout the ages gems have always
been incorporated into various forms of decorative art. Minerals, and to a certain extent even
fossils, can therefore be seen as intermediate between “Art” and “Science , to use these
anachronistic terms.
Examples, showing that both van Marum and the trustees were well aware of the geological
specimens’ aesthetic qualities, abound. It has already been mentioned how van Marum
104 Hoogtepunten uit Teylers Museum: Geschiedenis, Collecties en Gebouwen (Haarlem: Teylers Museum,
1996), 66. Recent study has shown that this rock specimen (referred to as the topje van de Mont Blanc) indeed
stems from the highest region o f the mountain (Personal communication with Bert Sliggers, Teylers Museum).
But at the same time, de Saussure presented a member o f the APS with “a specimen o f rock from the highest
pinnacle o f Mont Blanc” too. On this see: Proceedings o f the American Philosophical Society, vol. 2, 16, 1841,
101.