The Factual Sensibility

In 1683 the English polymath Elias Ashmole, charter member of the Royal Society, Comptroller of the Excise, student of alchemy, numismatics, history, botany, anatomy, and logic, officially made Oxford University a gift of the choicest collection of natural and artificial rarities then extant in the British Isles. In the preamble to the 1686 regulations for the museum built to house these objects Ashmole explained his donation: