s a
motor-car, once named as a native one of the greatest of English
racehorses. Camberwell, when willows grew about a village stream, long
since dry, named a butterfly; but Camberwell Beauties, though they sleep
sometimes in Surrey woodstacks, and flaunt their white-laced wings in
Surrey sunshine perhaps twice in a summer, fly no more by brooks in
Camberwell. Perhaps in the old days the Tradescants, who lived near
Vauxhall, used to catch them. The Tradescants, father and son, were
great naturalists and collectors, and at their house they got together
the museum of rarities which after their death came to the Ashmolean
Museum at Oxford. John Tradescant the son made a list of them, and
though Oxford ungratefully hid the collection in an outhouse and only
discovered it again in 1882, many of the curiosities he mentions move
undergraduates to surprise to-day. In the original list are strange
fowls. 'Some kindes of birds, their egges, beaks, feathers, clawes, and
spurres' begin the list of chapters, and then come a crocodile and an
'egge given for a dragon's egge,' and 'Easter egges of the patriarchs of
Jerusalem.' 'Two feathers of the phoenix tayle' I do not remember at
Oxford, nor 'a cherrystone holding ten dozen tortoiseshell combs, made
by Edward Gibbons.' But I think the Ashmolean collection still holds the
'flea chains of silver and gold, with 300 links apiece, and yet but an
inch long,' and, of course, the Oxford dodo's skin is famous. It was not
a dodo, though, to John Tradescant. It was a 'dodar, from the island of
Mauritius: it is not able to flie, being so big.' The wrong thing about
it all is that the name of the Tradescants ought to be associated with
the collection, and not the name Ashmole. It was never Ashmole's to give
to Oxford. Ashmole was a rich and greedy neighbour, and though
Tradescant left his museum to his widow and after her death to Oxford,
he, the polite Ashmole, bullied Mrs. Tradescant until she signed a paper
stating that she had begged him to take the museum for his own. She
would have signed anything, poor lady, to get rid of him. She suffered
so much from persecution from the generous donor of her husband's museum
to Oxford, that she drowned herself in a pond; a few months before
having signed a statement that she had 'caused a great heap of earth
rubbish to be laid against his garden wall'--doubtless she caused
nothing of the sort--'so high that on the 1st day of August last, in the
night, b