ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with William Hunter's early collection and situates this within a chronology of collecting practice. The question becomes more pronounced, with regular and highly publicised exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts at Somerset House forming one of the major cultural sights of London. There is no specific moment that historians can refer to as the turning point – when cabinets became museums and were therefore presented in a more rational, scientific way. The chronology of the emergence of museums is, in fact, a much more complex process. Clearly, a change took place but this was not always to the advantage of the collection. His articulation of the role of semiophores, is useful for his explanation of the collection object existing between the 'visible' and the 'invisible' worlds. There appears so much Contrivance, in the variety of Beings, preserv'd from the beginning of the World that the more any Man searches, the more he will admire.
