The Welwitsch Study Set: A Collection Ecology

In 1872, Austrian collector Friedrich Welwitsch died in London, leaving behind a will which aimed to distribute his widely respected collection of plants. Though the will stated that the study set of his collections be left to the British Museum (Natural History), the expedition had been formally sponsored by the Portuguese government to investigate their colony of Angola. Upon realizing their scientific value, the King of Portugal brought a lawsuit against the British Museum, with Kew Gardens entering in support of the Portuguese. But what was the study set and why was it so valuable that it drew the most powerful botanical institutions in Britain into a prolonged legal battle? This article will investigate the concept of a study set and will argue that it is more than just a collection of plant specimens. Instead, it is a collection ecology: an ecosystem of biological material, correspondence, diaries, labels, scientific instruments, and much more. The value of the study set was not simply in the number of rare and unique plant specimens it contained; those specimens would be rendered valueless without the attendant paper data that botanists found essential to support taxonomic claims. Moreover, it was reasoned that only certain institutional environments could handle the collection's long-term care, intensifying the debate around who should 'own' it. When we look at collections through this lens, we can begin to unravel the social, political, and environmental entanglements that defined collections, collectors, institutions, and even nations in nineteenth-century science.