Science and Place 389bound up with display. In such places, the aim is less to manipulate the
natural world by experiment or to participate in it through travel, but to
arrange it through classifi cation. What unites these venues is an emphasis
on collecting items and ordering them on the basis of some taxonomic
system. Take, for example, the museum, the origins of which go back to
those sixteenth- century “cabinets of curiosities” into which gentlemen
heaped oddities of all sorts.^38 In this space of accumulation a new form
of scientifi c knowing began to emerge. The stunning variety of natural
and cultural objects that the museum amassed did a good deal to feed the
hunger for facts. Thus, in his Novum Organum, Francis Bacon called for the
acquisition of what he called particulars and prerogative instances pre-
cisely because such practices challenged deductive reasoning and a priori
syllogism.^39 In this way the culture of collecting became established as a
valid way of knowing.
But museums were not simply about acquisition. As commodities
fl owed in from near and far they were reshuffl ed, placed, and displayed
according to the thinking of the curator. Thus even while museums ex-
hibited real- world objects, they refashioned reality through classifi cation,
location, and genealogy. Museums have thus always been, in a crucial
sense, hermeneutic practices in which the spatial ordering of phenomena
fundamentally realigns the world of nature. This means that the internal
spatial confi guration of the museum has always been crucial to the cogni-
tive claims it delivers. And as such, museum space has often been a site
of controversy. The different perspectives on evolution taken by William
King Gregory and Henry Fairfi eld Osborn, for example, found expression
in the spatial layout of their respective halls at the American Museum of
Natural History during the 1930s.^40 In Gregory’s Hall of the Natural His-
tory of Man, evolutionary continuity between the different human races
was the driving force, whereas Osborn’s Hall of the Age of Man sought to
undermine the theory of ape ancestry and to portray the different human
races as discrete “species.” Their respective displays gave visual expression
to the different social, political, and religious convictions of the two scien-
tists. In ways like this, the museum voiced the values of its curators.
In other places too, where scientifi c claims were bound up with exhibi-
tion, space crucially mattered, and disputes often arose. Take the case of
the special exhibit at the Bronx Zoological Gardens in September 1906.
Housed in the ape enclosure was a specimen designated on the posted sign
as: “The African Pygmy: Ota Benga. Age 23 years. Height 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State,
South Central Africa by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon
during September.”^41 Prior to being presented to William Hornaday, direc-