Now Is the Time to Collect

Daniel Giraud Elliot, Carl Akeley, and the Field Museum Africa Expedition of 1896

By Paul D. Brinkman

University of Alabama Press

The rediscovery of a curator’s lost journal illuminates the astonishing African journey that formed the basis of the Chicago Field Museum’s famed collections

“Now” Is the Time to Collect tells the fascinating story of the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History’s zoological expedition to Africa in 1896, the source of many of the museum’s foundational collections and an astounding episode in nineteenth-century science. After the well-publicized extinction of the dodo and Carolina parakeet and the collapse of the American bison population, late nineteenth-century naturalists expected many more vulnerable species to die out with spread of Western-style industrialization. This triggered a race to collect rare species of animals expected soon to be lost forever.

Established in 1893, Chicago’s ambitious Field Museum aimed to become a global center of study. Zoologist Daniel Giraud Elliot persuaded museum patrons to fund an immediate expedition to British Somaliland (contemporary Somalia). There, his team hunted and killed hundreds of animals for the growing collection. On the trip was groundbreaking taxonomist Carl Akeley. Back in Chicago, Akeley created captivating lifelike dioramas of rare animal groups that enhanced the museum’s fame and remain popular to this day.

Enriched with illuminated passages from Elliot’s journal, only recently rediscovered, “Now” Is the Time to Collect is the first book of its kind by an American museum and a case study in what author Paul D. Brinkman calls “salvage zoology”—the practice of aggressively collecting rare animal specimens for preservation just prior to the birth of the modern conservation movement. It is a riveting account of the expedition, the travelers’ experiences in Somalia during its colonial period, and the astonishing origins of one of Chicago’s classic museum experiences.

Reviews
Author

Distilling from an extraordinary, newly accessible archival source, Brinkman has fashioned a meticulous narrative of the expeditionary collecting of large mammals in Africa. . . . You’ll never look at the exquisite taxidermic African exhibits by Akeley without a new sense of their challenging origin and shifting meaning.’
—William Kimler, Associate Head and Director of Undergraduate Programs in History and associate professor of history at North Carolina State University

‘Now’ Is the Time to Collect is a very visual project, not only for the excellent photographs, but because the narrative is describing an epic expedition and everything about that expedition is visual.’
—Matthew James, author of Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin

Paul Brinkman skillfully integrates the unusually rich field diary of Daniel Elliot into the story of the new and ambitious Field Museum as its zoological director ventures into the British imperial Horn of Africa to encounter wildlife, local culture, and the desert landscape. Using letters, photographs, and other archival material, Now Is the Time to Collect is a compelling narrative and documents the salvage zoology rationale that motivated museum curators to shoot what specimens they could before anticipated extinction.’
—Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, professer Emeritus, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota

Paul D. Brinkman is head of the Science Research Lab and curator of Special Collections at the Environmental Research Laboratory and adjunct associate professor at North Carolina State University. He is author of The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush: Museums and Paleontology in America at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

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