MINERAL MAGIC
Step back in time at the Minerals Room in the Natural History Museum, London, which looks just as it would have in 1881 when the museum first opened to the public. Here, ranks of oak, glass-topped cases show o one of the finest and largest collections of minerals in the world. Highlights include a chunk of shimmering silver ore that was in the mineralogical collection of King George III; the Wold Cottage meteorite that fell to earth in Yorkshire in December 1795 as witnessed by ploughman John Shipley; and the mineral collection of Sir Hans Sloane, the noted physician and scientist whose wide-ranging collections spurred on the founding of the British Museum in 1753.
The mineral collection at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge represents the combined passion of major 18th and 19th- century collectors who brought together half of the 50,000 specimens: Edward Daniel Clarke – the University’s first Professor of Mineralogy, Sir Abraham Hume, Joseph Carne, Rev Thomas Wiltshire, and Henry Brooke, whose collection is still in its 19th- century case as Brooke’s will instructed. More mineral and fossil collections to visit: Horniman Museum and Gardens, London (020 8699 1872; horniman.ac.uk) Lapworth Museum of Geology, University of Birmingham, Birmingham (0121 414 3344; birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/ lapworth-museum) Lyme Regis Museum, Lyme Regis, Dorset (01297 443370; lymeregismuseum.co.uk) Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, Manchester (0161 275 2648; museum.manchester.ac.uk)