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As well as bringing together exotic rarities from distant climes, curiosity cabinets also contained practical tools and technology, and samples of the natural resources of local territories.

In this case we include rare and visually intriguing minerals from UCSB's C. D. Woodhouse Collection. We also display a nineteenth-century geologist's tool kit to call attention to the process of collecting, as well as to the way in which objects, such as tools, can shift from being purely functional to having historical or sentimental value. This geological assay kit would have been carried in the field by a geologist seeking commercially valuable mineral deposits. He would have tested minerals such as the stibnite and proustite.