Clare has turned the second bedroom into a wonder cabinet, full of small sculptures and drawings pinned up on every inch of wall space.

And the library that Charles Follen McKim designed in 1902 as an annex to the Morgan home was tailored to them: it's a cross between a bank vault and a wonder cabinet.

By the 1790s instrumental music had been written for concert performance for several centuries; paintings and other objects, including curiosities in "wonder cabinets," had been exhibited in collections even longer.

Botanical gardens were like living wonder cabinets, and they mixed aesthetic appreciation with visions of Eden and the dream of a walled-in paradise - of wilderness tamed, made orderly and useful.

The age of wonder cabinets gave way to the age of Descartes.

Baroque wonder cabinets were meant to encapsulate the universe in microcosm.

In other words, the early-modern wonder cabinet is no mere period piece, which is why the first half of "Devices of Wonder" contains a fully deployed and retrofitted 17th-century German Wunderkabinett.

Museums grew out of the old wonder cabinets.

The show simulates a Wunderkammer, a darkened wonder cabinet of the 17th or 18th century.

But the spirit of the wonder cabinets never altogether died.