Dear Andrew and Milan,

Thanks for your comments. I particularly liked Andrew's bit about trying and
convicting the despoilers of museums as war criminals. Blame is clearer in
some cases than others. The Germans wiped out Polish and Jewish cultural
sites wherever possible in the 1940s, and the Serbs targeted Croatian
cultural treasures in the 90s. Palestinians who barricaded themselves in the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre recently also have little sympathy from me. But
what about unintended damage incidental to the liberation of a city, such as
Prague in 1945? If memory serves, the Narodny (National) Museum there took a
hit from a stray Russian bomb, though most of the collection survived.

More recently, who's to blame for the looting of museums in Iraq during the
Gulf War? The looters, yes, obviously, but there is a lot of discredit to
spread around. The U.S. generals who did not send troops to guard the
treasures, including artworks of the earth's earliest civilization. The
planners of this war, who clearly did not give art and museums any thought,
contrary to American military planning during the Second World War. The
military dictator of Iraq, who made no special preparations to safeguard the
national treasures. The curators who did not keep an extra catalog of the
collections off-site. Although heroic efforts were made by individuals,
including curators, to save books and art and other collections, it is clear
that much of the looting was done by people who were intimate with the
collection, destroying catalogs to cover their tracks. What is especially
horrible about this is that none of this had to happen; so far as I know, no
major museum was injured by a bomb, although many irreplaceable archaeologic
sites were harmed by bombs, trenching, and looting.

If you are interested in this subject, and don't mind reading about art
galleries rather than natural history museums, see "The Rape of Europa,"
which deals with the preparations that galleries made in advance of World
War II, and their success and failure in various countries. Americans may be
intrigued to hear that some of the U.S. National Gallery's most signficant
paintings were hung at Biltmore Mansion in the mountains of North Carolina
during the war.

Those who live in countries where museums suffered terribly during wartime,
such as Belgium, are much more likely to advise splitting collections than
those whose museums have never suffered intentional damage, such as New
Zealand. I suspect that most curators in the U.S. give very little thought
to wartime preparations, although the threat of terrorism is making everyone
think again. As a matter of historical interest, most museums in the
Confederate States lost all their collections during the Civil War
(1861-65), and a major museum in New York (the original American Museum of
Natural History, unrelated to the current one) was burned by Confederate
terrorists. The worst 20th-century threat to American collections was
probably simple neglect.

As to transfer of collections: Around 1990 or so, Princeton divested itself
of major paleontologic collections because of a managerial decision that
paleontology was not a cutting-edge field. The invertebrate paleontology
collection was transferred to the National Museum of Natural History (one
branch of more than 50 in the Smithsonian Institution), and the vertebrate
paleontology collection went to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at
Yale University. Perhaps someone else has knowledge of their malacological
collection; I do not. I recently borrowed trace fossils from the Smithsonian
that were in the Princeton collection, which indicates that they are
accessible.

Stanford University had already begun divesting itself of natural history
collections by the 70s, though Stanford had been a leader in taxonomy during
the first half of the 20th century. Fish, fossils, and herbarium are now at
the University of California (Berkeley) and the California Academy of
Sciences (San Francisco), within easy reach of any Stanford researchers who
might want to consult them. But research has taken a different turn at
Stanford; those who are interested in natural history are well advised to
work or study at Berkeley instead.

There is much greater resistance to transferring libraries than to
transferring natural history collections, by the way.

Cheers,
Andy

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