The Wagner Free Institute of Science
Website: http://www.wagnerfreeinstitute.org
Hours: Tues-Fri 9-4
Cost: Free
The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a little known Victorian-era natural history museum just off of Temple's Main Campus. Established in the 1800s by William Wagner, a wealthy businessman, the museums intended mission is and was to provide a free education in the sciences for anyone interested. The museum has an extensive lecture hall and library while upstairs you can view specimens ranging from geodes and fossils to taxidermied mammals and skeletons of all sorts of creatures. Underneath the exhibit cases are drawers, also containing intriguing items of the natural world. Nearly all of the specimens were collected and organized within the museum in the 1800s by Wagner himself or his predecessor, Dr. Joseph Leidy.
During our visit to the Wagner Museum, I noted from our class discussions that the interior of the specimen area was organized by Darwin's taxonomy which forces the viewer to see the objects in a way that creates a relationship with the objects around it, for example, the human skeleton is in a case in the center of the room close to where the visitor enters the room. Beside the human is a chimpanzee, then the following primates get progressively smaller and less related to human beings.
One of the things that sets the Wagner apart from other natural history museums that I've visited was this: all of the labels are written using the specimens latin nomenclature, most do not list the common name which makes figuring out what things are pretty difficult. This was mentioned in our class discussion afterwards as being a hinderance for anyone not knowledgable in latin and that part of the reason for this was that it forces the viewer to enroll in the free classes and lectures that are taught at the institute to access the knowledge of the viewing room. In general though, the Wagner museum is unlike any other natural history museum I have ever seem because it has preserved its methods of exhibiting since the late 1800s and therefore is a specimen of that time period itself.
