ABSTRACT
In the history of science, scientific modelling has become widely recognised as a key element of the production of scientific knowledge, and conceptual models are part of the toolbox of science. Natural historians and natural philosophers/scientists have sought to understand Eighteenth-century naturalists observed living things and sorted them into groups – categories, types, species – to better understand natural diversity. In the language of natural sciences, specimens are ‘individuals selected for study’, doing work in regard to both the particular individual from which they are derived and the categories – whether species or populations – to which they belong, as surrogates or representatives of larger groupings. Defences of large collections assert that there is no such thing as a duplicate, but that is not to say that all collections are of equal value. Data-rich collections have greater potential than data-poor collections.
