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‘To one who questions if knowledge of glorious nature and of the animals on earth can be fostered, we say: “Come and See”; to one who questions if the knowledge influences the development of the mind, we call to the great men [of science] as witnesses’. This was how the first Visitors' Guide praised the achievements of the Amsterdam zoo in its early days. The zoo, with its motto Natura Artis Magistra (Nature is the Tutor of the Arts), is known generally as Artis. It was founded in 1838 in the old centre of the city and began with a collection of mounted skins of animals in a garret opposite the bookshop of Gerardus F. Westerman. He and two other burghers became the prime instigators for expansion into collections of living animals and then into the wider cultural centre of a natural history museum, library, concert hall, and aquarium. Throughout history, exotic and strange wild animals have been exchanged as gifts between monarchs and have been held in captivity as collective symbols of power and status. The Tower Menagerie in London, which lasted for 600 years, is one example of where collections of the kings' beasts were held, but neither in the Tower nor in any other historical menagerie were there any formal links with scientific study until the end of the eighteenth century. In Europe, the earliest collection of living wild animals to be placed under the public management of zoologists was the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, transferred from Versailles at the end of the French Revolution in 1793, with its first Director being Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Next came the Zoological Society of London, launched by Stamford Raffles and others in 1826, and soon followed by the opening of the London Zoo in 1828. The modern zoo can thus be said to have evolved from different but connected roots. First there was the collection of living animals as symbols of status, in much the same way as cabinets of curiosities were collected. Then there was the exhibition of exotic, deformed or ferocious animals for financial gain, for example in travelling shows, and finally there was the realization that the animals were a source of invaluable scientific research and education about the natural world. As one of the earliest of these sites of zoological science Artis emerged as a new form of learned society, for it combined the new zoo with a centre for cultural life in nineteenth-century Amsterdam.

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