Lantern Slides by Clement Lindley Wragge (c. 1900–22) – The Public Domain Review

Wragge’s teaching style was grandiose, a rhetorician, a twister who gathered ideas from every discipline his mind wandered. An observer of a 1902 lecture by Wragge described the meteorologist as the embodiment of the weather systems he observed: “His voice comes in gusts and dies away in murmurs; he occasionally travels with the speed of a small tornado”. The lecture brochure for the Wragge Institute and Gardens, which opened in 1916 in Birkenhead, Auckland, offers a glimpse of the encyclopedic ambitions of this Englishman, who sought to harmonize the furthest reaches of space with the inner depths of the soul: ‘astronomy, geography, travel, meteorology, natural history, radium, etc. in addition to lectures on Eastern and Indian philosophy, studies in the psychic and occult realms, practical gardening, and the evolution of the beautiful and other subjects”.