he had put together with his friend Andrew Balfour, who had recently died. The wide range of specimens was put on permanent display in the university, as one of the first museums in the UK. Daniel Defoe, in A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain published in 1737, called it "a fine Musæum, or Chamber of Rarities, which are worth seeing, and which, in some things, is not to be match'd in Europe". Later editions of the book said it had rarities not to be found in the Royal Society or the Ashmolean Museum. In 1767 the museum became the responsibility of the first Regius Professor of natural history, Robert Ramsey, then in 1779 his successor John Walker recorded that he had found the collection was in poor condition. The Regius Professorship, and the museum, was taken over in 1804 by Robert Jameson, a mineralogist whose course covered zoology and geology, who built it up "not a private department of the university but as a public department connected in some degree with the country of Scotland". In 1812 it was renamed the "Royal Museum of the University". An enormous number of specimens were acquired, by buying from other collections and by encouraging travellers abroad to collect and preserve their finds. Packages were delivered duty free, and half of the specimens collected by Royal Navy survey ships went to the museum (the other half going to the British Museum in London). Jameson's natural history course held practical classes three times a week in "the great museum he had collected for illustrating his teaching", including description of exhibits and identification of mineral specimens. With support from the University Authorities, Edinburgh Town Council and the Commissioners for the College Buildings, a new museum was built in 1820 as part of new university buildings (the museum is now occupied by the Talbot Rice Gallery, its main features still in place). The taxidermist John Edmonstone undertook work for the museum, and in 1826 gave private lessons to Charles Darwin, who later studied in the museum and befriended its curator, the ornithologist William MacGillivray. The collections, noted as "second only to those of the British Museum", overfilled the available space. In 1852 Jameson suggested proposals, which were put forward by the university Senatus, that the natural history collections be taken over by the government to form a new National Museum adjacent to the university,