[Excerpts from Zacharias Uffenbach's diary of his visit to Oxford in 1710 in the company of his brother Johann Friedrich Uffenbach] After this the Custos showed us the Devil's alphabet (as he innocently called it), since it is nothing more than
a printed tablet with Indian characters.
Further we were shown Joseph's coat; Monconys dans la suite de la seconde
partie de ses voyages, p. 101, speaks of it, but
names another place where he saw it. It is a coat made
of leather and trimmed with all kinds of fur of different
colours. Why it is so called, I cannot say; the Bible
does not tell us that he wore such a one—for I suppose
this is the Joseph intended.
We also saw here the little cubus mentioned by Monconys on the same page.
The block is fashioned out of a piece of oak, through
the top of which a brass ring has been so skillfully
passed that not only can it be turned completely
round, but it shows no sign of the place where it has
been soldered. This must, however, necessarily have
been done, unless, when the tree was still young, the
ring was inserted in a place where part of the tree had
been torn away. The tree might then have grown over
and round the ring so that in course of time they were
able to fashion this cubus with half of the ring exposed,
but how it was then loosened so as to revolve I do not
know. Therefore I much doubt whether this method
was employed and prefer to think that by some curious
art at was soldered by means of a lamp without silver
and the hole burnt in first by red-hot iron, after having
been prepared by the compass.
We also noticed the two great crocodiles of which Borricchius writes, as also the fine cranium overgrown with moss of which he likewise treats;
further the Indian cow's tail,
and also the cranium humanum
with its quatuor tuberculi,
which are all as Borricchius describes them.
But generally speaking the specimens
are in great confusion here, full of dust and soot,
and there are many among them, as has been said
above, and as is to be seen from this description,
which do not belong at all to an anatomical museum,
but would be much more suitable to an art gallery like
the Ashmolean Museum. When a dissection takes place
(which, as is universal in publicis lectionibus, scarcely
ever happens) it is never here but, as the custos himself
stated, in one of the other schools, possibly so as to
prevent the collections here from being injured or even
stolen.