London Zoo: 'Handsome Gifts' to a Young Society

In 1828 the Council of the recently formed Zoological Committee of the Linnean Society informed the public that its purpose was ‘to attempt the introduction of new races of quadrupeds, birds and fishes etc. applicable to purposes of utility either in our farmyards, gardens, woods, waters, lakes and rivers’. To this end it had opened to Fellows a menagerie in an area of Regent’s Park and established a museum in Bruton Street, Mayfair, to collect such ‘new races’. But most of its members, enthused by the natural science that had gripped the imagination of the educated throughout western Europe since the latter part of the 18th century had more personal objectives. The distinguished surgeon Professor (later Sir) Richard Owen (1804-92) intended to spend all his spare time dissecting the dead specimens that were sent from around the world, as well as those that died subsequently in the menagerie. He wanted to know in detail how they differed anatomically. Such enquiry was by no means new. In 1834 Owen asked the Council for £10 to enable him to continue the experiments, begun in 1725 by a Mr Hunter, to determine the difference between wolf, jackal and dog. The future prime minister, Lord Stanley, son of the naturalist 13th Earl of Derby wished to distinguish species by behaviour, by observation at his father’s estates at Knowsley. His appointment in 1830 as First Secretary for Ireland and in 1833 as Secretary for War and the Colonies does not seem unduly to have interfered with this endeavour. Stanley refused to believe that his Sandwich Island Geese, which swam in deep water, were of the same species as his Barnacle Geese, which paddled about near the shore. Owen and Stanley were among the many wealthy landowners and professionals who spent much of their time observing the differences between the large number of new species revealed by the spread of exploration to Asia and Africa.