The Wagner Free Institute

There are so many life forms here on Earth that it is impossible to comprehend the sheer variety and diversity of them all. Sure, there are Internet projects attempting to catalog all the planet’s species, perhaps a Sisyphean task, but for any one individual, it is all surely far too much. Mind-boggling; a good word, really, for the effect, at least on me, rather like the unfathomable sense of time on display in the Grand Canyon, upon whose edge I recently stood and looked down. 10,000 bird species, maybe; but 100,000 or so species of beetles? At least we can see those. Many species are too small to be seen with the unaided eye — at least 5000 species of phytoplankton, for instance; many of those that are visible are too far away to ever be experienced in one life-time; many have yet to be discovered. Some are disappearing at this moment…

The Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, was one kind of attempt to make some kind of sense of all this life. These often also included inanimate forms like minerals and fossils and even chimeras, fakes. They came out of a Renaissance urge to discover, describe, collect, and display, which flowed into the imperialist mission of Europe in the age of colonization. At first, these collections were private, cabinets or rooms in the homes of the wealthy and powerful; eventually, museums were founded to present the evidence of the Earth’s fecundity to the public, though every museum can only display a tiny proportion of its collection.
The Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia was established in the middle of the 19th century to provide free science education to all adults. Its exhibition hall, on the 2nd floor of its neoclassical home, is today still what it was set up as, a Victorian science museum. Row upon row of display cases reveal insects, mollusks, fish, birds, mammals, minerals, fossils, those ghosts of past life forms, and much more. Wandering around, as I did recently, the only person in the three-story space most of the time I was there, began to give me a sense of the expansiveness of planet Earth’s life like no other experience has. (And this, of course, is still just a very small sample.) I find this expansiveness, this amazing plethora, breathtaking, gobsmacking.

Interestingly, the Wagner was also the first branch of the Philadelphia Free Library, a broader view of libraries than one generally finds today. You should check it out.

Note: photography is not allowed in the Wagner. My collage is made up of their upcoming event notices, a postcard, and a Tiger cowrie shell I found in the gift store and could not resist even though I usually like to find my own natural history objects in the wild.