WUNDERKAMMER NEWS
MAY 2005

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The Sea Contained: A History of Conchology

Some of the shells from my collection: I have kept them for shape, not colour, so my collection is all-white.

When I was a child, growing up on the coast of Queensland, my family and I would often day-trip to the beach. It was always an exciting event, beginning with sunscreen and eye-spy in the car, followed by beachy activities and hamburgers and invariably ending at a local pub with a beer for Dad, a shandy for Mum and creaming sodas for my sister and I.

As soon as I had passed the age of sand-pies, I began a life-long love of beachcombing, mainly for shells, picking them up and marveling at their shapes and colours. Especially I loved hunting in weedy rock pools, which seemed like miniature worlds, and from which, I removed many brightly coloured shells only to see them fade not long after I had got them home. Most people who have grown up near a coast have similar memories of the excitement of finding a shell and the desire to keep it.
They are such perfectly contained objects of wonder, geometry and elegance.

The beginnings of shell collecting and its scientific study, conchology, are not very far removed from that beach-combing experience: a beautiful object washed up on a beach was taken and admired. In the early civilisations it may have been used as body ornament or for trade. There is evidence that cave dwellers from the Dordogne valley of France were wearing necklaces of shells, which could only have come from lands far away.

The admiration of shells was elaborated on during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when, the beautiful object became an exotic treasure to be placed in the fashionable ‘cabinet of curios.’ These cabinets of curiosities had pride of place in every aristocratic home from Holland to France and housed everything from coins and antiquities to exotic corals, plants and shells, This blending of art, artifice and natural objects encouraged a focus on ‘wonder’ rather than any systematic or scientific interest. Only as recently as the second half of the seventeenth century was the curiosity and desire for shells married with scientific study.

A new, rational approach to the examination of shells was heralded by the publication of three important books. The three men who wrote and published these books are celebrated in S.Peter Dances’ own wonderful book The History of Shell Collecting.
Dance pays homage to these three men as the instigators of a new realm of natural historical enquiry. The heroes of Dances’ homage were: Buonanni, an Italian, Lister, an Englishman, and Rumphius, a German.

Buonanni published what is, despite its whimsical title, perhaps the first real scientific treatise on shells, the “ Recreatione dell ‘Occhio e della Mente” ( Recreation for the Delight of the Eyes and the Mind). The work, published in 1681, was divided into four parts, each satisfying a different aspect of inquiry. Dance, quoting from Johnston writes:

“in the first he proves…that the study of shells is not a puerile but a wise and profitable occupation; investigates the mode of generation both of living and fossilised species; declares the fit materials from which they are formed; descants on their colours, forms, and properties..; and lastly enumerates their other uses to man.”

Lister, the Englishman made his important contribution with a large illustrated book published between 1685 and 1692. His book, the Historia Conchyliorum contained nearly five hundred folio leaves with over a thousand engraved plates of shells. The engravings, created by his daughter Susanna and wife, Anna were the first of their kind.

Rumphuius’ book, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, dealt with an entire Wunderkammern, but focused mainly on the section of the collection called the ‘Hard Shellfish’, which Rumphius considered the true wonders of the collection.
In this book Rumphius makes the important leap to divide his descriptions into three main groups, which he calls ‘genera’ or ‘orders’. These he describes as being: the ‘Snails or Whelks’, ‘Single-shelled Ones’ (‘which often cling with their other side to rocks’), and the ‘Two-Shelled ‘(Bivalvia). The illustrations throughout this work are detailed and beautifully rendered.

In many ways, the stage was perfectly set for the arrival of one of biology’s greats: Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus, (1707-78), is famed with introducing to the scientific world a system of classifying and naming species, upon which our current system is based.
His Systema Naturai was revolutionary, but unfortunately it lacked what so many collectors and scientists desired- illustrations. Instead Linnaeus used figure citations for other people’s works, which must have been confounding in the extreme considering that many of the cited books were either obscure or inaccessible. Also, irritating to the collector were the difficulties encountered in obtaining the new specimens described. These were men of science, not vagabonds or traveling seamen.

The conchologists’ frustrations were solved in part by the boom in exploration and publication which erupted in the early 19th Century. In 1826, under the auspices of the Natural History Museum of Paris, a young man, Alcide d’Orbigny was given the distinction of being selected to explore the southern half of South America. During his travels of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru he collected and laboured over the description of thousands of new species, the fruits of which were published under the title “ Voyage dans l’Amerique meridionale”- the fifth volume of which was dedicated solely to molluscs and comprised almost 800 pages in colour.

At around the same time, John Mawe, an Englishman, was returning shell-collecting to its’ origins, with a manual for the amateur – ‘The Voyagers Companion; or Shells Collector’s Pilot’. This delightful little folio encouraged shell collecting, whether it is for intellectual satisfaction, pleasure or commerce:

“Having sailed to most parts of the globe, I may say, from my own experience , that there is no station which affords such facilities for collecting shells…as that of commander or officer of a ship, whether he please to make it an amusement or a traffic.”

The nature-loving Victorians needed no invitation to add shells to the list objects to be collected, tagged and categorised. They contributed to what Dance called the Golden Age of Concho logy and had no difficulty furnishing their collections, as a number of shell dealers had materialised with ready specimens. In a way, that last great era of shell collecting sits in stark contrast to our experience now.

Now, when I go to the beach, I still pick up shells. I still marvel at their geometric intricacies and wonder at their colours, but I don’t take them home. The fragile ecology of the sea demands a new approach. The world of molluscs has been altered radically by our desire for their beautiful shells. Some species have been so over-harvested that they are in danger of extinction. Marine parks have been declared in places the world over, outlawing the collection of both live specimens and those washed up on beaches.
How sad, that our natural curiosity should destroy that which we covet and admire.
Now, when I admire my own shells collected all those years ago, it is still with wonder and nostalgia, but also with a little sadness for the ingenious creatures whose beautiful houses were their own undoing.

Bibliography

Dance, S.Peter Revised Edition of Shell Collecting: An Illustrated History, originally published by Faber and Faber, 1966.

Stillwell, Jeffrey.D, Facsimile Edition of John Mawes' Shell Collector’s Pilot, 2003, Published by the Western Australian Museum, originally published by Mawe, 1821

Beekman, E.M (ed) The Ambrose Curiosity Cabinet, by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius, Yale University Press, 1999

Mauries, Patrick, Cabinets of Curiosities , Thames and Hudson, 2002.