ABSTRACT
Since the eighteenth century, it has been natural to think of taxonomy as the natural scientific enterprise undertaken within museums. Indeed it takes considerable effort to suspend what we now know, in order to imagine that there ever were other ways of understanding the massed ranks of exhibits they contain.1 This chapter outlines how that methodology came to inspire such a loyal adherence. Museum makers and keepers have, of course, always grappled with the question of how best to order their collections. No matter how arbitrary, it has always been crucial to impose some system by which individual objects could most efficiently be stored and then, crucially, found again. And there has never been a time when the material world did not appear to its students to exhibit some sort of order. Long before the late-seventeenth century when taxonomy was about to take centre-stage in museum practice, keepers and visitors alike were closely concerned with how well or poorly ordered collections were. But if their statements are examined closely, it becomes clear that a cabinet praised for being “well-ordered” was one where the collections were disposed in a clean and tidy fashion so that research and inspection was made easy and pleasurable. What was missing was the notion that a collection should be organised according to a philosophically robust taxonomic regime.2 This came later. Order then was not absent in earlier collections, but its implementation came about more as a function of pragmatic and decorative needs than as an intellectual goal in and of itself.
