Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler

Greenblatt’s assertions as well. As gardeners and botanists, both father and son were farflung fieldworkers—the father traveling as far as Muscovy and Algiers, the son to Virginie itself, in their ongoing efforts to bring back and introduce novel plant species to the English countryside. It was in the very course of these travels that they first began compiling their own cabinet of wonders, and it was the fame of that cabinet (and of their gardens) which in turn garnered them the contacts necessary to enlist other travelers in their collecting efforts. A wonderful letter, dated 1625, from Tradescant the Elder (writing on behalf of his new patron, the Duke of Buckingham), to Edward Nichols, the then-Secretary of the Navy, begins: “Noble Sir,”
    I have Bin Comanded By My Lord to Let Yr Worshipe Understand that It Is H Graces Plesure that you should In His Name Deall withe All Merchants from All Places But Espetially the Virgine & Bermewde & Newfownd Land Men that when they Into those Parts that they will take Care to furnishe His Grace Withe All maner of Beasts & fowells and Birds Alyve or If Not Withe Heads Horns Beaks Clawes Skins Fethers …
    and so on and so forth, culminating in a list of more specifically desired items, which included, among others:
    on Ellophants head with the teeth In it very large
    on River horsses head of the Bigest kind that can be gotton
    on Seabulles head withe horns
    All sorts of Serpents and Snakes Skines & Espetially of that sort that hathe a Combe on his head Lyke a Cock
    All sorts of Shining Stones or of Any Strange Shapes
    finally concluding, succinctly:
    Any thing that Is Strang.
    And as MacGregor’s various ensuing citations from letters written by various contemporary visitors to the Ark attest, the Tradescants had indeed collated a whole bunchof things that were “strang.” 19 There are frequent references to human horns, for example, though all such supposed horns (including that of Mary Davis of Saughall) have in the meantime unaccountably, though perhaps not surprisingly, disappeared.
    MacGregor quotes a Georg Christoph Stirn who, in describing the collection, as he observed it in 1638,noted, among other items: two huge ribs from a whale (out in the courtyard); “a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree”; “a number of things changed into stone” (in other words, fossils, which in other such collections often get referred to as “picture stones”); the hand of a mermaid; the hand of a mummy; a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ; “pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book”; “a bat as large as a pigeon”; an instrument “used by Jews in circumcision”; the robe “of the King of Virginia”; a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem; “the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone” …
    That last reference, to the crucifixion of Christ daintily carved on a plum stone, brought me up short as I sat there hunched over Stirn’s letter amidst the field of worktables at the New York Public Library. It set me to riffling through the back pages of MacGregor’s catalogue, with its detailed inventory of all the rarities from among the Tradescants’ collections that have survived among the Ashmolean’s holdings to this day. (Along the way I came upon a map of the Siege of Pavia, the very same one that graces Wilson’s wall at the museum, followed by no less than
fourteen columns
of scrupulous scholarship explicating the tiniest details of a painting depicting the 1534 siege that had gotten included in Tradescant’s collection—Fig. 74, Cat. no. 263.) Eventually, to my astonishment, I came upon the following:
    181. FRUIT STONE CARVING (PL. LXXXVI)
Almond stone (?): the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing abiretta over long hair, a long tunic of