Plate 1 from Nehemiah Grew's Musaeum Regalis Societatis.preserved at Gresham Colledge

Plate 1 from Musaeum Regalis Societatis, or, A catalogue & description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge, by Nehemiah Grew. Grew's catalogue lists all the artifacts in the possession of the Royal Society, specimens, instruments, curiosities, etc.

The Royal Society’s museum collection, or Repository, was established in the 1660s. It was intended to be “a General Collection of all the Effects of Arts, and the Common, or Monstrous Works of Nature”, for use by the Fellows in their attempts to understand and classify the natural world. The first catalogue of the collection was produced by Nehemiah Grew in 1681.

The plate includes studies of ‘A Stone voyded by the Urethra of a Man; a ‘Weesle Headed Armadillo’ (‘Tatu Mustelinus’, in Grew’s description); the ‘Head of the Baby-Rousa’ or Horned Hog (Babirusa, a species of pig found in Indonesia); a ‘Tusk of a Wild Boar’; and the ‘Head of the Hippopotamus or the Behemoth’.