End of Charles Darwin’s walking stick
Charles Darwin owned this walking stick. It is made of whalebone, a hard-wearing material suited to walking sticks. The ivory hand grip or the pommel at the top of the stick is a skull. The skull has two glass green eyes. Darwin called his stick his ‘morituri’, a type of ‘memento mori’. These objects remind their owners of the short time people live on earth. Charles Darwin (1809-82) is famous for his theory of evolution outlined in The Origin of Species, first published in 1859. Darwin’s walking stick was collected by Henry Wellcome as a relic of someone Wellcome considered a ‘great man.’
Darwin’s walking stick is on display in our Medicine Man gallery!
When it was OK (indeed, de rigueur) to make things out of whalebone.
