Section CDD/G - SLIDE COLLECTION

Extent: 26 slides boxes and 3 original cabinets

Darlington's lecture slides. These were originally stored in three wooden cabinets, two of which (the 'first' and 'second') are physically identical. A note from Barrie Juniper (written 'Oxford, 24.2.99) was found in a drawer in the 'third' cabinet. It relates to Darlington's entire slide collection, i.e. all three cabinets. The note explains that Juniper was asked by Darlington's wife, Gwendoline, to help disperse her husband's library following his death in 1981. Juniper also took away Darlington's collection of lecture slides to save them from destruction. He says that the collection divides into two parts. The first part comprises glass slides (3 and a quarter inches square) covering cytological work at Merton and Bayfordbury that Darlington still used in lecture courses in the 1950s and 1960s. The second part is from the period following his appointment as Professor of Botany at Oxford in 1953. These slides are plastic, in 35mm format, with repeats of all the cytological work in the first part, 'but now including human and chimpanzee chromosomes'. This set also contains his later work on variegation, chimaeras, origin of crops, genetic disorders etc. The first part is represented by the 'first' and 'second' cabinets; the second part by the 'third' cabinet. The slides from the first and second cabinets have been removed from their drawers, re-packaged and placed in standard slide boxes, G.1-G.26, and numbered in a continuous sequence, 1-521. They have been listed by cabinet and by drawer, and labels on the drawers have been reproduced in the following descriptions. Darlington's inscriptions (labels) on the individual slides, where they exist and are legible, have been reproduced on the individual slide packages. The contents of the third cabinet have not been been removed. The cabinet and contents have been given a single number, G.27.