Pioneering work, which describes the contents of one of the most significant 18th-century collections of natural history and ethnography. The Museum grew from two important private collections: the naturalist Marmaduke Tunstall began collecting for his private museum in London in the 1770s, acquiring numerous 'curiosities brought by Captain Cook'; he moved the collections in 1776 to his new home at Wycliffe, Yorkshire; after his death the Wycliffe Museum was bought by George Allan, lawyer and avid antiquary, adding it to his own substantial holdings to form the Allan Museum. On his death the museum went to his son, and in 1822 the combined collections passed into the hands of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. The collection remains intact in Newcastle today.

Pioneering work, which describes the contents of one of the most significant 18th-century collections of natural history and ethnography. The Museum grew from two important private collections: the naturalist Marmaduke Tunstall began collecting for his private museum in London in the 1770s, acquiring numerous 'curiosities brought by Captain Cook'; he moved the collections in 1776 to his new home at Wycliffe, Yorkshire; after his death the Wycliffe Museum was bought by George Allan, lawyer and avid antiquary, adding it to his own substantial holdings to form the Allan Museum. On his death the museum went to his son, and in 1822 the combined collections passed into the hands of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. The collection remains intact in Newcastle today.

Fox's Synopsis is an important work in the early cataloguing of collections of this type and remains the main source of information for this still extant collection. It is a rarity: Forbes records a single copy (Bishop Museum) and, despite much of Australian interest, it was not noted by Ferguson.

Of significance are various ethnographic specimens brought back from Cook's voyages. The section "Utensils of Savage Nations" contains notes on artefacts from New Zealand, 'Owhyhee and other Sandwich Islands', Otaheite, Tonga, New Caledonia, and the Americas. Allan had mentioned 'curiosities brought by Captain Cook' in the title of a manuscript catalogue of this collection, and recent research has confirmed that two artefacts derive from the Endeavour: a painted paddle from New Zealand drawn by Sydney Parkinson during the voyage, and a Tahitian nose-flute drawn by J.F. Miller in 1771. Another source of artefacts described by Fox was a collection donated by Captain Wilson of the missionary ship Duff. The two major items described by Fox - a Tongan barbed spear and a Marquesan wooden gorget - survive in the collections today.

Working mainly from the handwritten labels in the Museum, Fox catalogued the huge number of natural history specimens which included various species newly-discovered at the time of collection. Of particular interest to Australia are the descriptions of the wombat (with an engraved plate) and the duck-billed platypus (pp. 248-250), both based on the first specimens of their kind sent back to Europe (in 1798 by Governor Hunter, a member of the Museum's parent institution "The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society"). There are a number of ornithological specimens from New Holland, New Zealand, and the Sandwich Islands (pp. 127-162). There is reference to a pair of parakeets brought to England by the King and Queen of Hawaii (p. 31), while the most interesting of the birds must be the "Blue-headed and bellied Parrot", the Australian lorikeet taken alive in 1770, while Cook's Endeavour was at Botany Bay; it became the pet of the Tahitian priest Tupaia and after his death came into the possession of Joseph Banks, who took it back to London. It later made its way, still evidently as a living specimen, into Tunstall's museum.