I'm trying, with limited success, to research the origins of the Natural History museum--the wunsterkammers and similar of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book looked fairly promising, and started fairly promisingly, but unfortunately veered somewhat aside after the first chapters. As I should probably have suspected of a book written by a philosophy professor, it spent a lot of time exploring the "philosophy" and theory behind modern museum displays--which might have been a lot more entertaining if that was what I was actually looking for. As it was, I found the historical discussions tantalizing but insufficient, and the modern bulk of the book unappealingly theoretical.