Rijksmuseum van Geologie en Mineralogie
[1] Proposed by the then director of the Natural History Museum, H. Schlegel, K. Martin, a young German geologist, was appointed as ordinary professor of geology at the Leiden University in 1877.
During a field trip in 1884-1885 he managed to make extensive collections, comprising well over 800 specimens, in Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire as well as in Surinam and Venezuela.
Under Escher's guidance field work was started in the porphyry district near Lugano; soon afterwards in the Bergamasc Alps in northern Italy, and later also more in the south, in the Apennines and Turin Hills.
All these activities accumulated European material; Escher led excursions to Switzerland and Italy; staff members also to 'classical' regions in Germany, France and England.
After the Second World War the areas where Leiden students did their field work became more varied, and this meant also more variety in the collections brought to the Museum.
Most of them still went farther afield: Sweden (Dalsland), France (Pyrenees, Belledonne), Switzerland (southern Alps), Spain (Cantabrian Mountains and Galicia), Morocco and even Surinam.
It contained — apart from much other valuable material — a large number of fossils from the Upper Cretaceous of southern Limburg and as such was a very desirable and important addition.
Two more cases are worth mentioning: a donation of some 1500 erratics by the Geological Museum of Wageningen University, and a gift from the 'Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij' consisting of c. 250 cores from borings in various parts of the Netherlands.
Beets set himself to the task of making the RGM not only in name but also de facto the Dutch national geological museum and centre of research.
Apart from these campaigns, Museum staff members went all over Europe on collecting trips or further afield: Canada, U.S.A., Jamaica, El Salvador, Algeria, Rhodesia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Australia.
Some 6300 samples and about 5000 thin sections of sedimentary and crystalline rocks of the Oman Mountains, donated by the 'Shell Internationale Petroleum Maatschappij', The Hague.
A large collection of fossils, notably foraminifera and rudists, and rock specimens from the Cretaceous and Tertiary of Jamaica, from the Geological Institute of the University of Amsterdam.
