Wunderkammern
Miss Coralie Venn of Boscastle, angler and spirit-medium, tied every one of these spindled specimens herself as lures for fish that swim only through the luminiferous ether. On the night of the 1882 transit of Venus she is said to have landed something that no taxidermist in Cornwall would consent to stuff.
The Society for the Recovery of Lost Forms kept this case as its reliquary. The society met in a room above a Holborn tobacconist from 1859 until its members unaccountably began to moult, and each fellow contributed one creature he had personally dreamed into existence and then, with considerable difficulty, ensnared.
Mrs. Philippa Crewe-Hollis bought the suspended pearl-white globe at a séance auction in Bath, where she was assured that it held the last breath of a moon-moth; she built the rest of the cabinet around it as one builds a cathedral around a splinter of the True Cross.
When the Honourable Clementina Ashby-Pole bequeathed the case to the museum in 1903, she stipulated that the iridescent glass eye in the upper corner must never be turned to the wall, since it was the only means left by which her great-grandmother, a minor oracle, could watch the cricket.
A Lyonnais glassblower named Achille Dorsay built the tank to the specifications of a dream, and when the dreamer, a convalescent cabinet minister he never named, woke and declined to pay, Dorsay is said to have sealed the man's insomnia inside it, where it goes on blooming in purple.
Lord Alphonse Treleaven commissioned the pale pig-bear in the lower right compartment as a portrait of his own conscience, which, his physician reported, he had seen quite distinctly at the foot of his bed on three consecutive nights in the winter of 1874.
Captain Ezra Pendleford of the Admiralty's short-lived Abyssal Office devised the aquarium as a scale model of the ocean as he saw it while drowning, briefly, off the Azores in 1861, and he would admit no specimen he had not personally met on the way down.
The plaster face in its niche is a life-mask of Professor Ambrose Lychfield, comparative anatomist and founder of the cabinet, who arranged the surrounding compartments so that he might watch over his specimens in perpetuity and who, the accession file notes, has twice been seen to blink.
The beaded tendril hanging from the right-hand lamp was the rosary of Sister Perpetua of the Bermondsey Ursulines, who added one black pearl for each nightmare she drove out of the parish children until, the story goes, it took root and began to exorcise them on its own initiative.
The egg-collector and dowser Lavinia Stroud commissioned the whitewashed case as a nursery for minerals, which she took to be merely very patient animals, and she lined each compartment with hair from her own brushes so that they would not catch cold during an incubation she reckoned at some eleven thousand years.
The mushroom lamps were installed by the cabinet's second owner, Mrs. Dorothea Fiske, a Spiritualist of the Cheltenham school, who held that a garden of the dead must be lit from below, since the newly deceased are invariably shy of being seen from above.
The arch was built to the specifications of Madame Séraphine Tourneur, a clairvoyant of Marseille, who claimed that her familiar, the bristling creature enthroned on the ribbed fungus, had been born in the gap between two of her heartbeats and needed, for its comfort, a ceiling shaped like the inside of a held breath.
Major Rupert Hallam, a retired army surgeon, commissioned the sleeping elephant in Bombay alabaster, holding that an elephant's memory was a physical organ lodged behind the left ear, and he installed the carving in his cabinet so that it might go on remembering on his behalf once his own faculties had gone.