Another Life/Michael Viney:My teenage town of Brighton was great for free museums, essential to the reveries of a non-sporting boy with a bike. At the Royal Pavilion there was a library that let me take nine books at once and two floors of huge stuffed animals, totem poles and Roman things dug up on the Downs.
Up the Dyke Road was the Booth Bird Museum, perhaps the finest incarnation of Victorian taxidermy in the whole of southern England: not an eagle's feather, bustard's glass eye or wisp of dried moss out of place in an all-subsuming silence.
Such institutions are known now as "cabinet museums", since most grew out of the private collections of well-to-do naturalists. Edward Booth was the archetypical Victorian twitcher: he kept a private carriage at the station for attaching to the first train out to the latest rarity (this to be shot and stuffed).
I saw nothing quite like his collection again until I entered the Natural History Museum on Dublin's Leinster Lawns, where hundreds of birds take their perches in a grand evolutionary tableau of some 10,000 animals.
At around the same time, the late and great American evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, was climbing around the museum's glass cabinets to measure the antlers of the Irish elk. He got filthy in the process, since the tops of the cabinets were an inch-deep in dirt: "My, oh my," he wrote later, "the museum was a dingy place back then [ 1971]." But he was still enchanted with its atmosphere and the huge and systematic presentation of wildlife, "for nothing thrills me more than the raw diversity of nature".
Indeed, he wrote a special essay - "Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!" (in Dinosaur in a Haystack) - to laud its later restoration, having found it "uplifted from squalor to glory" in the 1990s. The decision to preserve what the present keeper, Nigel Monaghan, has called a "museum of a museum" was, wrote Gould "not only scientifically right, but also ethically sound and decidedly courageous".
He would certainly also have applauded the grant of €15 million in the recently announced National Development Plan, part of a billion-euro investment in arts and culture. The museum, amassed from collections dating back to the 18th century, is itself 150 years old this August and unique in the world as a purpose-built cabinet museum that is also a national museum of natural history: a time-warp produced partly by lack of money but also by Ireland's long indifference to science.
The museum's contents, unsteadily heated by a century-old system and blasted by unregulated sunlight, are seriously threatened with fading and decay: to last another century, the building needs environmental control, proper lighting, a lift, a coffee shop and an adequate loo, not to mention a classroom and some modern exhibition space. All this, we are promised, can be achieved while leaving the new giraffe (installed in 2003) to peer serenely from the midst of a largely unchanged Victorian interior.
Good lighting sounds particularly seductive. One thinks what might be done for one particular treasure - the array of fantastically accurate and exquisite glass models of marine animals made by the Blaschka family of Dresden (because the real things lost their colours when kept as corpses in a jar). The museum has close on 400 of them - one of the finest collections in the world - and its "Crystal Creatures" exhibition this winter was a revelation that drew wide praise.
But what the public sees, and what keeps the daily school parties bouncing happily from one case to another, is only part of what a natural history museum is about. Behind the scenes are vast collections of specimens - perhaps two million organisms (half of them insects) - that represent the biological diversity of Ireland. Not all of them are yet properly catalogued and more are being added all the time to the online database project with UCD (www.ucd.ie/zoology/museum).
The museum is expected to know what everything is. Its expertise in taxonomy is under constant pressure from health inspectors, agricultural and customs officials, environmental consultants and university research scientists, not to mention all the gardeners and curious observers who send "this funny beetle" in a matchbox to be identified. There are also exhibitions to run and educational programmes to devise.
The keeper, Nigel Monaghan, now has three curator scientists and one technician reporting to him. In a 2005 study for the Royal Irish Academy, an expert committee urged a professional staff of 16 - modest enough when compared with the 33 staff of Denmark's Aarhus natural history museum and the 22 graduates of the Ulster Museum's sciences division.
Stephen Jay Gould claimed an extra virtue for natural history museums - their potentially "profound effect" on certain teenagers. While cabinet museums might never appeal to children who need "soundbites and flashing lights", there were those for whom they could be "magic places . . . that can spark the rare flames of genius". Didn't quite work for me, obviously.
EyeOnNature
On March 9th I cooked freshly pulled spinach and found on it a freshly picked caterpillar. A record cabbage white? SL Piggins, Westport, Co Mayo
It was more likely the caterpillar of a turnip moth which overwinters as a caterpillar, forms a cocoon in late spring with the moths emerging in early summer.
A pair of mute swans spend nine months each year on our local lough. At noon on February 24th they put on an elaborate performance of necking and beaking, then proceeded to couple in the water. More display, swilling of bills and preening followed. This is very early, and to see the actual act is most uncommon. Wallace Clark, Mahera, Co Derry
I found a frog with his arms wrapped tightly around a goldfish in my Nana's pond. He clung on so tight that the fish could not move. I tried to lift him off but he just clung on tighter. I had to prise his arms away and he then let go. After a few minutes the fish recovered and swam away. Was he trying to mate with the poor fish? Lorcan Garvey (10), Glasnevin, Dublin
He was.