VINDICATION!!!!!!!!!!

HEY!!

My lifetime habit of collecting and saving Mother Nature's delights was vindicated last evening when I opened The LUNAR MEN – Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed The World,

Jenny Uglow, 2002, and read the following:

The beginning of the 18^th century……..

Nature, on every hand, offered herself for investigation. The great vogue for collecting had reached new peaks. The whole of the natural world suddenly became ‘collectable’, as if knowledge were conveyed directly, visibly, tangibly by the objects in a cabinet of curiosities.

When Peter the Great asked the philosopher Leibniz in 1708 what he should collect, the answer, it seemed, was ‘everything’:

Such a cabinet should contain all significant things and rarities created by nature and man. Particularly needed are stones, metals, minerals, wild plants, and their artificial copies …..Foreign works to be acquired should include diverse books, instruments, curiosities and rarities…..In short, all that could enlighten and please the eye’.

Hey, HEY!!!!!