Royal treasures of science

Abstract

Alan Q. Morton and Jane Wess, Public and Private Science: The King George III Collection . Oxford University Press in association with the Science Museum, 1993. Pp. 710. £75. ISBN 0-19-856392-2. On the Continent of Europe, the assembling of cabinets of scientific instruments was considerably more common than it ever seems to have been in Great Britain. A number of such foreign collections still survive, in palaces, learned institutions, monasteries and universities; some have been transferred to museums. In this country there were fewer to start with, and now very few exist, even in residual form. There is one fairly complete and magnificent exception, the collection which is associated with King George III. From 1769 these instruments and apparatus were housed at the King’s Observatory at Richmond (now called the Kew Observatory, and still standing). Most were later transferred to King’s College, London, and a museum displaying them was opened in 1843. Then in 1927, the bulk of the earlier material, about 1000 items, was passed on to the Science Museum, where it remains to this day. A rather selective, but useful, catalogue was published in 1951, but this present large and lavish volume written by two curators at the Science Museum offers very much more information than has been previously available in print and it is unlikely that any similar exercise will need to be conducted in the foreseeable future. The publication coincides with a new display of part of the collection at South Kensington. The small band of scholars of early instruments will be sorry to find that, having had their appetites whetted by the book, it has not been possible to display a much larger part of the collection in a systematic way. It should not be thought that the collection, both in published form and in actuality, will appeal only to instrument enthusiasts. The assemblage reflects a variety of fundamental aspects of cultural life in Great Britain in the 18th and early 19th century and it forms a major resource of historical evidence.