Listy Władysława Taczanowskiego do Aleksandra Straucha w zbiorach Rosyjskiej Akademii Nauk – interesujący przyczynek historii zoologii w XIX wieku

Letters from Władysław Taczanowski to Alexander Strauch in the Russian Academy of Sciences Collections. An Interesting Contribution to the History of Zoology in the Nineteenth Century The article presents the Polish translation and analysis of the letters from Władysław Taczanowski (1819–1890) to Aleksander Strauch (1832–1893). The correspondence is stored in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and comprises 29 letters written between 1870 and 1889. The main theme of these letters is specimens of reptiles and amphibians sent to Warsaw by Polish naturalists, such as Benedykt Dybowski from Siberia, Konstanty Jelski from French Guiana and Peru, Jan Kalinowski from Korea, as well as specimens brought by Taczanowski from Algeria. Strauch determined the species and used them in his publications. This correspondence is also a valuable testimony of the exchange of specimens between the Warsaw Zoological Cabinet and the Zoological Museum of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. In return for herpetological specimens, the Warsaw collection received numerous fish specimens from the Russian Empire and a collection of birds from Mikołaj Przewalski’s expedition to Central Asia. The content of the letters allows a better understanding of the functioning of natural history museography but also the organization of shipments, preparation, determination, and exchange of specimens. They are a valuable document of the history of nineteenth-century scientific museography.

THE EUROPEAN BISON OF THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY IN PARIS AND THE HISTORY OF ZOOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY MUSEOGRAPHY IN THE XVIII AND XIX CENTURY

This article presents a history of the European bison specimens preserved at the National Museum of NaturalHistory (MNHN) in Paris. The inventory made in 1945 by Jacques Millot, who first noticed the importance of these collections for the conservation of the species, constitutes a starting point of the present analysis. The oldest European bison of the MNHN collection came from the royal menagerie of Versailles. Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was the first who has published a description of the species, four years before publication of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus. Then Georges Cuvier, when working on the MNHN collections, distinguished the European bison from aurochs and compared it to the American bison. His research has contributed to the development of the notion of “extinct species”. This article presents also the history of the European bison from the Zoo of Cologne and the specimens from Petersburg, by Friedrich von Brandt, with a focus on the difficulties of obtaining specimens of the European bison in XIX century. European bison specimens from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris have played a particularly important role in the history of the species biology. They also offer an interesting perspective for genetic studies on the species.