Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History).

v.18:no.4 (1988:Oct.

Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History) Botany

v.22:no.1 (1992:June

The rites of man: The British Museum and the sexual imagination in Victorian Britain

In the nineteenth century, the British Museum possessed a locked store of erotic objects. However, this did not serve to sanitize the rest of the collection. I use the evidence of an anonymous tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of the time, to show how a wave of anti-Catholic agitation led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. A wide range of objects, images and motifs were interpreted as evidence of pagan fertility cults, thus throwing into question the seemliness of the Museum's public displays. However, I use the evidence of an anonymous early Victorian tract, Idolomania, set in the context of other literary productions of its times, to show that the early Victorian wave of anti-Catholic moral panic led to claims that the public displays of the British Museum were saturated with morally dangerous material. Although I cannot and do not claim that this was a mainstream view, I do use this tract to emphasise that there is a ongoing tradition of eroticised readings of sculpture galleries, even ones supposedly purged of explicitly sexual material. That this fact is not widely recognised may be to do with dominant conceptualisations of the separation between art and pornography that date from the Victorian age. Much classical and Hindu statuary may indeed have been intended indirectly if not directly to produce erotic responses. And it we want to fully engage with the power of bodily representations in museum collections it may be sensible to openly acknowledge sexual fetishism as a social construction and, therefore, the diversity and unpredictability of arousal

Why Not Eat Insects? Vincent M. Holt. Hanworth, Middlesex: reprinted by E. W. Classey, 1967. 99 pp. $2.10.

Excerpt: According to the British Museum Catalogue, this curious and interesting little work was first printed in 1885. F. S. Bodenheimer devotes several pages to it in his Insects as Human Food, and notes that the booklet has now [1951] almost disappeared. In London it was apparently only available at the British Museum, where it was destroyed by bombing. The only copy to be found by the author was in the University Library at Oxford . . . I have located no copies in the United States except the one at the USDA Library. Due to its extreme rarity, and its timeliness now that our population explosion and dwindling resources have given us a rather unpalatable source of \u27food for thought\u27, Why Not Ear Insects? is well worth reprinting, and E. W. Classey has performed the service

British Museum

Taha Toros Arşivi, Dosya Adı: Taha Torosİstanbul Kalkınma Ajansı (TR10/14/YEN/0033) İstanbul Development Agency (TR10/14/YEN/0033

Nicolleta Gullace Associate Professor of History, COLA, travels to England

On June 16th I travelled to London for a two-week research trip to archives holding valuable material on the history of the First World War. I stayed in a Quaker boarding house off of Russell Square and walked to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth and the British Library next to Kings Cross Station. I also made several profitable trips to the British National Archives near Kew Gardens in West London, where Government papers are held. On my weekend, I visited relatives in Suffolk, who live near the location of a zeppelin raid that took place over East Anglia in 1917

Crustacea.

192

The Secwepeme Museum and History

The Secwepeme Museum and Heritage Park in Kamloops is the first native-owned and operated museum to be developed in the interior of British Columbia. The museum derives its mandate from the Shuswap Declaration of 1982, an agreement signed by the 17 bands of the Shuswap Nation to work in unity, preserve, perpetuate and enhance the Shuswap language, history and culture