curators

"With few exceptions, luminous insects throughout the world belong, broadly speaking, to one family of Beetles, the , or to give them their popular name, the Fireflies and Glow-worms. The most important exception to this statement is afforded by the Fireflies of the West Indies and Central America, locally known as " Cucujos," which, though still Beetles, belong to quite a different family, the or Skipjacks. ... Though usually present to a greater or lesser degree in both sexes, the luminous property is generally developed much more highly in one sex than in the other. When it is the male beetle that possesses it in the greater degree, the light is shown when the insect is on the wing, and is generally of an intermittent or flashing character, and gives to the insects their popular name of Fireflies. On the other hand, when the power of luminosity is the more highly developed in the female beetle, the character is usually associated with a more or less complete absence of wings, and the insect becomes merely a crawling, unpleasant-looking, worm-like creature, generally known in fact as a Glow-worm, which nobody who is not an entomologist would ever dream of calling a Beetle. The males of these insects are winged, in form closely resembling the Fireflies, and are totally unlike their spouses. The consequence of this utter dissimilarity between the two sexes of one species is, that it is not easy to co-relate them properly in our collections."

"Whatever value these records may possess lies in the fact that when they were made, Japan had within a few years emerged from a peculiar state of civilization which had endured for centuries. Even at that time, however (1877), changes had taken place, such as the modern training of its armies; a widespread system of public schools; government departments of war, treasury, agriculture, telegraph, post, statistics, and other bureaus of modern administration, — all these instrumentalities making a slight impress on the larger cities such as Tokyo and , sufficiently marked, however, to cause one to envy those who only a few years before had seen the people when all the wore the two swords, when every man wore the and . The country towns and villages were little, if at all, affected by these foreign introductions, and the greater part of my memoranda and sketches were made in the country."

"In the gardens of the better classes summer-houses and shelters of rustic appearance and diminutive proportions are often seen. Rustic arbors are also to be seen in the larger gardens. . High fences, either of board or , or solid walls of mud or tile with stone foundations, surround the house or enclose it from the street. Low rustic fences border the gardens in the suburbs. Gateways of various styles, some of imposing design, form the entrances; as a general thing they are either rustic and light, or formal and massive."

"Fifty years ago in , while walking along the road I passed an open field and noticed to my astonishment hundreds of flashing in perfect unison. I watched this curious sight for some time and the synchronism of the flashing was unbroken. Many times after I have watched these luminous insects, hoping to see a repetition of this phenomenon, but the flashes in every instance were intermittent. Since that time I have read about these insects in various books without meeting any allusion to this peculiar behavior. At last I have found a confirmation of my early observations. In of December 9, page 414, is the report of an interesting paper read before the by entitled “ Luminous Insects ” in which reference is made to the remarkable synchronism of the flashes in certain European species of fireflies. ..."

"On the approach of winter, s bury themselves in the ground, and those that have shells retire within the shell as far as possible, and close the aperture of the shell with a film of the mucus which the body secretes so abundantly. In this condition they remain dormant until revived by the warm weather of spring. If the pupil will collect a number of snails in the early spring, and keep them confined in a box, with earth, damp leaves, or bits of rotten wood or bark, the snails in the course of a few weeks will lay a number of little eggs. These eggs will be white and round, about the size of a pin’s-head. By careful tending, that is, by keeping the leaves slightly moist, the eggs will hatch out tiny snails, and these will attain half their mature size the first season."

"Soon after his first arrival in Japan, Morse became interested in everything bearing on the ancient culture of the people. This was shown in the epoch making discovery and excavation of the . Implements and pottery were found there. In 1878 he wrote that he was starting a collection of pottery. ... In 1890 this great collection was deposited with the Boston Art Museum and two years later the Museum bought it, Morse being made Keeper of Japanese Pottery and holding the office for the rest of his life."

"One of the reasons why the Catholic Church attains greater success than the Protestants in China is that its missionaries are men, its preachers are men, the dresses in Chinese garb, he lives among them and becomes one of them ; he is careful not to interfere with their superstitions only so far as these interfere with his own, and is especially careful not to inveigh against the . His , , and picturesque ritual does not widely differ from the Buddhist."

"A major contribution to African and Indian Ocean archaeology."

"There is no other archaeological site like Teniky in Madagascar. So, the question arises as to what group of people settled there, far inland, and carved the niches and chambers in the cliff walls about 1,000 years ago. The presence of imported ceramics indicates that they took part in the Indian Ocean trade networks at the time but doesn't tell us where they came from."

"What we found at Teniky"

"Who were the people who lived at Teniky?"

"We already have some ideas there. And the connection to CeNak and the partnership between the cities of Hamburg and Dar es Salaam can help."

"There are few accounts of Madagascar written at the turn of the first and second millennia AD. Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, a tenth-century Persian sailor and writer, collected stories from sailors in port towns on the Persian Gulf which suggest that Persian contacts with Madagascar may have existed then. The name Madagascar did not exist at that time but names like "Wak-wak" or "Qumr"/"Komr" may have referred to the island."

"Chinese ceramics in the collection of the Museum of Art and Archaeology of the University of Antananarivo."

"Our study of high-resolution satellite images revealed the Teniky site was much larger than previously known. It showed there were more terraces and stone walls on a hill 2km to the west. This led us to take a closer look, hoping to get a better sense of who had lived there and when."

"His work is interested in looking at the material as a by-product, as well as questioning contemporary notions of participation and authorship. The research-based practices result in research-performance installations as with his more recent 'Non-Participation Performance' and 'Continuity' works. Over the last four years, Witt has been exploring seemingly disparate subjects in Occupied Palestine, Israel and Lebanon on his project 'A Interloper' which looks at the vernacular of religious calendars found in Jerusalem and originating in the Middle East, looking at different notions of bodily displacement."

"Nathan Witt's work is primarily interested in identifying value and meaning through the dissemination of visual culture and learned history. Since 2002, Witt has produced a varied body of work that includes texts as specific counter-images and counter-objects, focusing on the integrity of the motive and its manipulation; as well as defacing press releases, making books and drawing."

"It is interesting to look at how the advent of technology can have an impact on museum practices and the works of contemporary artists."

"Writing, remembering, narrating history and – as with your work – performing history, becomes a duty and responsibility towards knowledge. But at the same time, this responsibility and the striving for knowledge is inherently akin to tensions."

"The performance bridges the gap between the physical, the digital and immaterial realms. In a way, looking at all the different elements that constitute your performance, I would argue that it inhabits the discursive space prompted by the physical space that engages its viewer?"

"Derrida, in Writing and Difference, discusses the contradiction of simultaneously writing to remember and writing to forget and quotes Hegel: 'I will speak later about the profound differences between the person of sacrifice, who operates ignorant (unconscious) of the ramifications of what they are doing, and on the Sage (Hegel), who surrenders to a knowledge that, in their own eyes, is absolute."

"I thrive in challenges and finding ways to break down barriers."

"In 2011, after retiring from his role as senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, and following a windfall from presenting a TV series, Fortey purchased four acres of prime and wood. Located in the , a mile from his hometown of , Grim’s Dyke Wood is the very patch that had Mill so enraptured two centuries ago. Though it has changed in the intervening years, it is still a glorious spot – Fortey’s initial intention was to use the wood as a way to “escape into the open air”, to record a rich ecology of living wildlife following a career locked away in dusty museums studying dead things. He soon realised, however, that any portrait of the place would be incomplete without its human histories, too."

"Fossil hunting was a slightly more esoteric pastime, but what is perhaps most telling about Fortey’s childhood was his awakening to s. Today there is a whole library of richly illustrated guides and scholarly works on mushrooms. The fungus foray is a popular activity offered for public participation up and down the country. Yet when Fortey did it there were no teachers and the only widely available book was The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. It covered 200 of the many thousands of British species. Fungi, in short, are difficult. The author tells us he remains an amateur enthusiast, but it is a mark of his ability that he describes how, in 2006, he found a tiny fungus Ceriporiopsis herbicola new to science. The discovery of entirely unknown organisms happens to few, but it happens in Britain to almost none. You realise that a challenge in this funny and entertaining book is peeling back the curtain of the author’s self-deprecation."

"… Trilobite expert, tiddlywinks player, mushroom hunter, poetry enthusiast and ardent lover of the museum, Fortey joined the staff of the paleontology department in 1970. He tells us that at the time he joined, the museum was so hierarchical that there were separate lavatories for “scientific officers” and “gentlemen.” (Both, however, were supplied with toilet paper that had “Government Property” stamped on each sheet.)"

"One lies upturned on the sand. Its tail sake waggles feebly, quite unable to perform the task of turning the body back over again. Five paris of legs twitch ineffectually in a vain attempt to achieve the same end. I find it impossible to resist the temptation to right the poor animal. It is easy to grasp it by the edges of the head-shield. Once righted again those spindly legs allow the crab to trundle slowly away. Its behaviour seem at once strangely determined, but also apparently random, like the slow progress of a confused old lady on a ."

"The trilobites, of course, overall have a fantastic variety of morphologies — fantastic variety of shapes. So you would expect them to have many different sorts of life habits."

"I ought to introduce you to trilobites ... fossil arthropods distantly related to the s and s of today, but very distantly related — enormously diverse in the ... rocks ... with an evolutionary history of their own of several hundred millions of years ..."

"It was that did it for me. “Dr was an eccentric in the grand manner … he always wore hand-tooled cowboy boots with elaborate curlicues in the stitching and a hat and jacket to match. He was very shortsighted, and tended to stumble along in the purposeful way adopted by the cartoon character Mr Magoo, while mumbling vigorously to himself.” The Magoo lookalike also carries a whip and a six-shooter, but that is not what matters most about him: what matters is that he was an expert on the s of the . .. A book that starts with slimy things in the oceans and continues to the dawn of human civilisation in the must offer more than just a procession of challenging concepts and unfamiliar words, and accordingly up pops Mr Magoo, with whom Fortey (himself big on the trilobites of the Ordovician) once shared a hotel room."

"Collecting a pile of fossils is only the beginning. Many fossils are only fragments of the whole animal or plant. To piece together the whole organism is rather like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of the complete picture to work towards. Piece has to be added to piece, and the larger and more fragmentary the animal the more the result is in question. Not surprisingly mistakes have been made. The first reconstruction of the dinosaur Iguanodon finished up with its thumb on its nose!"

"... Time piles rock upon rock. The sea comes and goes with the passing geological ages. Unless other events intervened, my trilobite would have become interred within an ever deeper pile of sediments, to a depth possibly beyond the deepest coal seam, and buried into an obscurity from which it would never emerge. But often in geology that which is buried is destined to rise. Phases of mountain building throw up rocks that were once deep beneath the surface. The British isles have been through no fewer than three such phases since my trilobite scuttled about on the sea floor. The first of these — the — was responsible for disinterring my fossil."

"… if you look back into history, the way the world has divided up into, say, linguistic groups, cultural groups, is ultimately under the control of geology. So, for example, think of the differences between the peoples north and south of the Himalayas. It’s extremely hard for people to cross – even the individual valleys within the Himalayas have cultural differences. Their history has been controlled to a large extent by those barriers. That’s a great control. But even on a small scale, the way cities looked – you know, the kind of cities that could be built – was controlled by the rocks that underlay it. For example, you could build tower blocks in New York because you had that nice, firm metamorphic rock to drive your piles down into. And the particular building stones are what have given, well, let’s say the majority of French cities and towns their own peculiar and interesting flavor. So geology controls the character of the world to a large extent."

"The public galleries take up much less than half of the space of the Natural History Museum. Tucked away, mostly out of view, there is a warren of corridors, obsolete galleries, offices, libraries and above all, collections. This is the natural habitat of the curator. It is where I have spent a large part of my life—indeed, the Natural History Museum provides a way of life as distinctive as that of a monastery. Most people in the world at large know very little about this unique habitat. This is the world I shall reveal."

"There are moments when you’re driving or walking around, and you find yourself in that meeting point."

"You can’t expect people to live in cities, to trade in cities, to exchange ideas in cities, if they don’t have the basic right to shelter in those cities."

"I think that’s the work that curator’s do. I see it less as a challenge, it’s just the task at hand."

"has given the world some of its most important plants: the Pará Rubber-tree ('), the Pineapple ('), Cacao ('), the Tapioca Plant or Cassava ('), Coca (' var. ipadu), the Brazil-nut Tree ('), paradise nuts (' spp.), the Curare liana ('), and yet others. Each of these species has local s and wild relatives that may be of inestimable value in future genetic projects that may be oriented towareds various aspects of improving cultivated forms for greater yield, disease resistance, adaptation to different soil and climatic conditions, and sundry other characteristics."

"A very recent survey of natural s has pointed out that more than 200 species of higher plants comprise the study, that they are widely distributed in the plant kingdom (146 genera in more than 50 families) and that the active principles are known for only about 45 species (Schultes and 1980) , Harvard Univ. 28 (186–190). This survey attributes the lack of chemical knowledge of these plants to two causes: (i) the lack of good animal models which the chemist can utilize in monitoring his isolation work; and (ii) the paucity of field work of scientific trustworthiness in fast disappearing aboriginal societies. The survey ends with the statement that the “… Plant kingdom remains a fertile and almost virgin territory for those interested in the discovery of new psychoactive drugs, not to mention other types of biologically active compounds waiting in silent hiding.”"

"There have long been two strongly divergent poles in our evaluation of ethnobotany. Some students are carried away in an enthusiastic assumption that native peoples everywhere have a special intuition in unlocking the secrets of the Plant Kingdom. Others cast aside or at least denigrate all aboriginal folk lore as not worthy of serious scientific consideration. Both viewpoints, of course, are unwarranted. The accomplishments of native peoples in understanding plant properties so thoroughly must be simply a result of a long and intimate association with their s and their utter dependence on them. Consequently — and especially since so much aboriginal knowledge is based on experimentation — it warrants careful and criticai attention on the part of modern scientific efforts. It behooves us to take advantage now of this extensive knowledge that still exists in many parts of the world, lest it be lost with the inexorable onrush of civilization and the resulting extinction of one primitive culture after another. This experimentally acquired knowledge may not much longer be avaílable."

"Once you see what science is, then there's no stopping you. If you have curiosity, if you keep your childhood curiosity, then every day is amazing."

"“Most people think about, at most, an election cycle,” he says. That can lead to shortsightedness on issues such as climate change: “How do we, as humans with our rapidly growing populations, not destroy all the natural ecosystems?” he wonders."

"It has been science that has greatly accelerated the human endeavor over the last few centuries and it will be science that will meet the challenges of the present century."

"I am stubbornly optimistic and that helps me take on challenges of all sizes. During my life, I have witnessed breathtaking scientific discoveries and situations where single individuals have driven positive change. I am also a big believer in the power of teams and the ability of small groups of committed people to achieve great things."

"It’s amazing. Kids love gardening. The point is that whatever you want children to learn, it is best to start early. They see it as fun, relaxing and the end result of seeing what they have planted blossom is satisfying. In order words catch them young. I also find it elating when I give back to those that will eventually run the world. In a way, it is one of my ways to gradually introduce politic to the kids; we do engage in conversations while working. I want to say I’m proud that as a politician I’m certain that I can impact a lot of positive changes in society, especially through the children."

"I am impacting positively on the general well-being of our society by grooming the children young. It also gives the children happy memories of growing up. Directly, these help the children appreciate nature and humanity."

"As a politician, I am a servant of the people and one of my tasks is to contribute positively to the community and ensure a better quality of life for all, especially our children who are our future heroes."

"There is humanity in art and charitable work and this is a powerful tool to use in politics if one is to serve the people correctly. We have to care for our youth, elders, under-privileged and those with other challenges. This is the focus of my charity and the message I send through my art."

"Education starts from teaching our young ones these values from an early age."

"... I have still never seen a ghost for myself, even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum, where the ancient dead can lie peacefully, and many of the living have witnessed strange things. Sometimes I have crouched immobile in the evening darkness at the top level of our Victorian Arched Room library, like a wildlife photographer at a waterhole, waiting in silence for a spectral figure who has, they say, more than once been observed. For me, though, no shady visitor."

"! The world's oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!"