Abstract
REFERENCE was made recently in the columns of NATURE (July 15, p. 91) to the origin of certain of the provincial museums as centres of intellectual and social exchange in days of less easy transport and communication. An example of a museum originating in this manner and of the function it is now able to fulfil in municipal life is afforded by the Public Museum of the City of Gloucester. This museum was founded in 1859 by members of the Gloucester Literary and Scientific Association (now dissolved) and the Cotteswold Naturalists Field Club. The collections were housed originally in two rooms lent by Mr. Sydney Dobell, but were removed to the Art School in 1872, and finally transferred to their present home in the Price Memorial Hall in 1900, having been handed over to the Corporation by deed in 1896. A scheme of reorganization has been completed recently and the occasion marked by the issue of a “Short Guide to the Collections”, which includes, in addition to the collections in the Public Museum, those of the Folk Museum in Bishop Hooper's Lodgings, opened by Dr. R. E. Mortimer Wheeler in 1935. The Public Museum covers both natural science and archæology; and specimens are available for detailed examination by students and research workers in a reference room set aside for the purpose. The archæological specimens are in the main of local derivation, and are arranged to illustrate the development of the material culture of early man in the local environment down to Saxon times. Historical relics later than the Norman Conquest are to be found in the Folk Museum, which illustrates the medieval and later economic and social life of the city and surrounding country in agriculture, trades—Gloucester is famous for its early iron-working—and the home. A special exhibit arranged for the jubilee conference of the Museums Association at Cheltenham in July had as its most prominent exhibit a selection of the local horn industry, which has existed in Gloucester since medieval times and still survives in one small factory.
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Gloucester Museum. Nature 144, 411–412 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144411b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144411b0