When a member of a scientific institution lamented the lack of financial support for the study of nature in nineteenth-century Frankfurt, the fault was first and foremost laid at the door of the wealthy compatriots, whose meagre monetary contribution revealed their reluctance to fulfil their duty to the community. Few assumed that this duty devolved, at least partly, on the municipal government and its coffers. Thus Wilhelm Kobelt, a malacologist and an ambitious member of a scientific association in Frankfurt, grumbled in his diary on 3 May 1870 that ‘the old Frankfurters who still had money to spare for scientific purposes are becoming ever rarer’. The Senckenberg Society for the Study of Nature (Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft), the institution that meant so much to him, was a voluntary association that maintained its facilities, including an extensive natural history museum, solely on the basis of contributions from its members and fellow citizens. Matters of culture and learning followed a tacit and simple rule in nineteenth-century Frankfurt: the residents should tend to it. The institutions and individuals in the public domain were solely responsible for fostering and cultivating the kind of arts and sciences that the dwellers of the city needed. The participation of the government was kept to a minimum, as was its intervention.