One of the crowning glories of the Victorian Gothic revival is London's Natural History Museum in South Kensington. When the museum first opened in 1881, a terracotta statue of Adam overlooked proceedings from a vantage point at the pinnacle of the most lofty gable. Whether this was the original conception of the designer, Alfred Waterhouse, or of the chief scientific sponsor of the museum, Richard Owen, is not known. But whatever the origins of the idea, it was a fitting symbolic gesture. Much as the protoplast had surveyed the creation, named and classified the creatures, and bent them to his ends, those who now laboured within the confines of the museum also sought to bring order to the unruly diversity of nature and to organise the whole of the living world into a kind of material encyclopaedia. As recent visitors to the museum may be aware, the original statue of Adam can no longer be seen, for some time after the end of World War II it was toppled from its commanding position – whether an accident, an act of mindless vandalism, or an ideological statement, has never been ascertained. This particular fall of Adam might also be vested with symbolic significance, for the twentieth century witnessed the final stages of the secularisation of scientific knowledge, along with the development of a degree of historical amnesia about the role of religion in its early modern origins.