Spring 2025 HSTM Colloquium - Paul Brinkman
Title: Now is the Time to Collect: Museums & Salvage Zoology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, naturalists anticipated the extinction of innumerable wild animals due to the global spread of Western civilization. Economic development, especially land-intensive practices like farming, logging, ranching, and urban sprawl, was destroying or degrading natural habitats worldwide. Yet development was an integral part of that quintessential Victorian virtue: progress. Victorian naturalists, then, viewed extinction as the inevitable, if regrettable, byproduct of humanity’s advance. The demise of species was a pity, many naturalists agreed, but the loss was a small price to pay to maintain the pace of progress. To mitigate the problem of the loss of scientific data through extinction, museum zoologists assumed the role of salvaging the remnants of these threatened species – while they could still be acquired – and preserving them as museum specimens for all time. The scientific rationale behind salvage zoology was obvious: certain animals were doomed to extinction by the unrelenting spread of Western civilization. Zoologists, therefore, were obligated to harvest their specimens and keep them in museum collections as a permanent record of disappearing nature. The practice of salvage zoology had its heyday in the 1890s, then eventually gave way to conservation in the early twentieth century, as more and more naturalists prioritized the saving of species over the taking of specimens.
