A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

  When the man departed, Fortey said to me: "That was a very nice chap named Norman who's spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John's wort. He retired in 1989, but he still comes in every week."

  "How do you spend forty-two years on one species of plant?" I asked.

  "It's remarkable, isn't it?" Fortey agreed. He thought for a moment. "He's very thorough apparently." The lift door opened to reveal a bricked-over opening. Fortey looked confounded. "That's very strange," he said. "That used to be Botany back there." He punched a button for another floor, and we found our way at length to Botany by means of back staircases and discreet trespass through yet more departments where investigators toiled lovingly over once-living objects. And so it was that I was introduced to Len Ellis and the quiet world of bryophytes--mosses to the rest of us.

  When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favor the north sides of trees ("The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark") he really meant lichens, for in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren't distinguished. True mosses aren't actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses. In fact, mosses aren't actually much good for anything. "Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses, commercial or economic, as the mosses," wrote Henry S. Conard, perhaps just a touch sadly, in How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts , published in 1956 and still to be found on many library shelves as almost the only attempt to popularize the subject.

  They are, however, prolific. Even with lichens removed, bryophytes is a busy realm, with over ten thousand species contained within some seven hundred genera. The plump and stately Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland by A. J. E. Smith runs to seven hundred pages, and Britain and Ireland are by no means outstandingly mossy places. "The tropics are where you find the variety," Len Ellis told me. A quiet, spare man, he has been at the Natural History Museum for twenty-seven years and curator of the department since 1990. "You can go out into a place like the rain forests of Malaysia and find new varieties with relative ease. I did that myself not long ago. I looked down and there was a species that had never been recorded."

  "So we don't know how many species are still to be discovered?"

  "Oh, no. No idea."

  You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "the meetings can get very lively at times."

  I asked him for an example of controversy.

  "Well, here's one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen," he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. "That," he said, tapping a moss, "used to be one genus, Drepanocladus . Now it's been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis ."

  "And did that lead to blows?" I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.

  "Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling."

  Mosses offer mysteries as well, he told me. One famous case--famous to moss people anyway--involved a retiring type called Hyophila stanfordensis , which was discovered on the campus of Stanford University in California and later also found growing beside a path in Cornwall, on the southwest tip of England, but has never been encountered anywhere in between. How it came to exist in two such unconnected locations is anybody's guess. "It's now known as Hennediella stanfordensis ," Ellis said. "Another revision."

  We nodded thoughtfully.

  When a new moss is found it must be compared with all other mosses to make sure that it hasn't been recorded already. Then a formal description must be written and illustrations prepared and the result published in a respectable journal. The whole process seldom takes less than six months. The twentieth century was not a great age for moss taxonomy. Much of the century's work was devoted to untangling the confusions and duplications left behind by the nineteenth century.

  That was the golden age of moss collecting. (You may recall that Charles Lyell's father was a great moss man.) One aptly named Englishman, George Hunt, hunted British mosses so assiduously that he probably contributed to the extinction of several species. But it is thanks to such efforts that Len Ellis's collection is one of the world's most comprehensive. All 780,000 of his specimens are pressed into large folded sheets of heavy paper, some very old and covered with spidery Victorian script. Some, for all we knew, might have been in the hand of Robert Brown, the great Victorian botanist, unveiler of Brownian motion and the nucleus of cells, who founded and ran the museum's botany department for its first thirty-one years until his death in 1858. All the specimens are kept in lustrous old mahogany cabinets so strikingly fine that I remarked upon them.

  "Oh, those were Sir Joseph Banks's, from his house in Soho Square," Ellis said casually, as if identifying a recent purchase from Ikea. "He had them built to hold his specimens from the Endeavour voyage." He regarded the cabinets thoughtfully, as if for the first time in a long while. "I don't know how we ended up with them in bryology," he added.

  This was an amazing disclosure. Joseph Banks was England's greatest botanist, and the Endeavour voyage--that is the one on which Captain Cook charted the 1769 transit of Venus and claimed Australia for the crown, among rather a lot else--was the greatest botanical expedition in history. Banks paid £10,000, about $1 million in today's money, to bring himself and a party of nine others--a naturalist, a secretary, three artists, and four servants--on the three-year adventure around the world. Goodness knows what the bluff Captain Cook made of such a velvety and pampered assemblage, but he seems to have liked Banks well enough and could not but admire his talents in botany--a feeling shared by posterity.

  Never before or since has a botanical party enjoyed greater triumphs. Partly it was because the voyage took in so many new or little-known places--Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea--but mostly it was because Banks was such an astute and inventive collector. Even when unable to go ashore at Rio de Janeiro because of a quarantine, he sifted through a bale of fodder sent for the ship's livestock and made new discoveries. Nothing, it seems, escaped his notice. Altogether he brought back thirty thousand plant specimens, including fourteen hundred not seen before--enough to increase by about a quarter the number of known plants in the world.

  But Banks's grand cache was only part of the total haul in what was an almost absurdly acquisitive age. Plant collecting in the eighteenth century became a kind of international mania. Glory and wealth alike awaited those who could find new species, and botanists and adventurers went to the most incredible lengths to satisfy the world's craving for horticultural novelty. Thomas Nuttall, the man who named the wisteria after Caspar Wistar, came to America as an uneducated printer but discovered a passion for plants and walked halfway across the country and back again, collecting hundreds of growing things never seen before. John Fraser, for whom is named the Fraser fir, spent years in the wilderness collecting on behalf of Catherine the Great and emerged at length to find that Russia had a new czar who thought he was mad and refused to honor his contract. Fraser took everything to Chelsea, where he opened a nursery and made a handsome living selling rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, Virginia creepers, asters, and other colonial exotica to a delighted English gentry.

  Huge sums could be made with the right finds. John Lyon, an amateur botanist, spent two hard and dangerous years collecting specimens, but cleared almost $200,000 in today's money for his efforts. Many, however, just did it for the love of botany. Nuttall gave most of what he found to the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Eventually he became director of Harvard's Botanic Garden and author of the encyclopedic Genera of North American Plants (which he not only wrote but also largely typeset).

&nb
sp; And that was just plants. There was also all the fauna of the new worlds--kangaroos, kiwis, raccoons, bobcats, mosquitoes, and other curious forms beyond imagining. The volume of life on Earth was seemingly infinite, as Jonathan Swift noted in some famous lines:

  So, naturalists observe, a flea

  Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

  And these have smaller still to bite 'em;

  And so proceed ad infinitum.

  All this new information needed to be filed, ordered, and compared with what was known. The world was desperate for a workable system of classification. Fortunately there was a man in Sweden who stood ready to provide it.

  His name was Carl Linné (later changed, with permission, to the more aristocratic von Linné), but he is remembered now by the Latinized form Carolus Linnaeus. He was born in 1707 in the village of Råshult in southern Sweden, the son of a poor but ambitious Lutheran curate, and was such a sluggish student that his exasperated father apprenticed him (or, by some accounts, nearly apprenticed him) to a cobbler. Appalled at the prospect of spending a lifetime banging tacks into leather, young Linné begged for another chance, which was granted, and he never thereafter wavered from academic distinction. He studied medicine in Sweden and Holland, though his passion became the natural world. In the early 1730s, still in his twenties, he began to produce catalogues of the world's plant and animal species, using a system of his own devising, and gradually his fame grew.

  Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never "been a greater botanist or zoologist," and that his system of classification was "the greatest achievement in the realm of science." Modestly he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription Princeps Botanicorum , "Prince of Botanists." It was never wise to question his generous self-assessments. Those who did so were apt to find they had weeds named after them.

  Linnaeus's other striking quality was an abiding--at times, one might say, a feverish--preoccupation with sex. He was particularly struck by the similarity between certain bivalves and the female pudenda. To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names v ulva, labia, pubes, anus, and hymen. He grouped plants by the nature of their reproductive organs and endowed them with an arrestingly anthropomorphic amorousness. His descriptions of flowers and their behavior are full of references to "promiscuous intercourse," "barren concubines," and "the bridal bed." In spring, he wrote in one oft-quoted passage:

  Love comes even to the plants. Males and females . . . hold their nuptials . . . showing by their sexual organs which are males, which females. The flowers' leaves serve as a bridal bed, which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. When the bed has thus been made ready, then is the time for the bridegroom to embrace his beloved bride and surrender himself to her.

  He named one genus of plants Clitoria. Not surprisingly, many people thought him strange. But his system of classification was irresistible. Before Linnaeus, plants were given names that were expansively descriptive. The common ground cherry was called Physalis amno ramosissime ramis angulosis glabris foliis dentoserratis. Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata , which name it still uses. The plant world was equally disordered by inconsistencies of naming. A botanist could not be sure if Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro was the same plant that others called Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina . Linnaeus solved the puzzlement by calling it simply Rosa canina . To make these excisions useful and agreeable to all required much more than simply being decisive. It required an instinct--a genius, in fact--for spotting the salient qualities of a species.

  The Linnaean system is so well established that we can hardly imagine an alternative, but before Linnaeus, systems of classification were often highly whimsical. Animals might be categorized by whether they were wild or domesticated, terrestrial or aquatic, large or small, even whether they were thought handsome and noble or of no consequence. Buffon arranged his animals by their utility to man. Anatomical considerations barely came into it. Linnaeus made it his life's work to rectify this deficiency by classifying all that was alive according to its physical attributes. Taxonomy--which is to say the science of classification--has never looked back.

  It all took time, of course. The first edition of his great Systema Naturae in 1735 was just fourteen pages long. But it grew and grew until by the twelfth edition--the last that Linnaeus would live to see--it extended to three volumes and 2,300 pages. In the end he named or recorded some 13,000 species of plant and animal. Other works were more comprehensive--John Ray's three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum in England, completed a generation earlier, covered no fewer than 18,625 species of plants alone--but what Linnaeus had that no one else could touch were consistency, order, simplicity, and timeliness. Though his work dates from the 1730s, it didn't become widely known in England until the 1760s, just in time to make Linnaeus a kind of father figure to British naturalists. Nowhere was his system embraced with greater enthusiasm (which is why, for one thing, the Linnaean Society has its home in London and not Stockholm).

  Linnaeus was not flawless. He made room for mythical beasts and "monstrous humans" whose descriptions he gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers. Among these were a wild man, Homo ferus , who walked on all fours and had not yet mastered the art of speech, and Homo caudatus , "man with a tail." But then it was, as we should not forget, an altogether more credulous age. Even the great Joseph Banks took a keen and believing interest in a series of reported sightings of mermaids off the Scottish coast at the end of the eighteenth century. For the most part, however, Linnaeus's lapses were offset by sound and often brilliant taxonomy. Among other accomplishments, he saw that whales belonged with cows, mice, and other common terrestrial animals in the order Quadrupedia (later changed to Mammalia), which no one had done before.

  In the beginning, Linnaeus intended only to give each plant a genus name and a number-- Convolvulus 1, Convolvulus 2, and so on--but soon realized that that was unsatisfactory and hit on the binomial arrangement that remains at the heart of the system to this day. The intention originally was to use the binomial system for everything--rocks, minerals, diseases, winds, whatever existed in nature. Not everyone embraced the system warmly. Many were disturbed by its tendency toward indelicacy, which was slightly ironic as before Linnaeus the common names of many plants and animals had been heartily vulgar. The dandelion was long popularly known as the "pissabed" because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included mare's fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock, hound's piss, open arse , and bum-towel . One or two of these earthy appellations may unwittingly survive in English yet. The "maidenhair" in maidenhair moss, for instance, does not refer to the hair on the maiden's head. At all events, it had long been felt that the natural sciences would be appreciably dignified by a dose of classical renaming, so there was a certain dismay in discovering that the self-appointed Prince of Botany had sprinkled his texts with such designations as Clitoria, Fornicata, and Vulva.

  Over the years many of these were quietly dropped (though not all: the common slipper limpet still answers on formal occasions to Crepidula fornicata ) and many other refinements introduced as the needs of the natural sciences grew more specialized. In particular the system was bolstered by the gradual introduction of additional hierarchies. Genus (plural genera ) and species had been employed by naturalists for over a hundred years before Linnaeus, and order, class, and family in their biological senses all came into use in the 1750s and 1760s. But phylum wasn't coined until 1876 (by the German Ernst Haeckel), and family and order were treated as interchangeable until early in the twentieth century. For a time zoologists used family where botanists placed order , to the occasional confusion of nearly everyone. * 36

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bsp; Linnaeus had divided the animal world into six categories: mammals, reptiles, birds, fishes, insects, and "vermes," or worms, for everything that didn't fit into the first five. From the outset it was evident that putting lobsters and shrimp into the same category as worms was unsatisfactory, and various new categories such as Mollusca and Crustacea were created. Unfortunately these new classifications were not uniformly applied from nation to nation. In an attempt to reestablish order, the British in 1842 proclaimed a new set of rules called the Stricklandian Code, but the French saw this as highhanded, and the Société Zoologique countered with its own conflicting code. Meanwhile, the American Ornithological Society, for obscure reasons, decided to use the 1758 edition of Systema Naturae as the basis for all its naming, rather than the 1766 edition used elsewhere, which meant that many American birds spent the nineteenth century logged in different genera from their avian cousins in Europe. Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code.

  Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground. Even today there is more disorder in the system than most people realize. Take the category of the phylum, the division that describes the basic body plans of all organisms. A few phyla are generally well known, such as mollusks (the home of clams and snails), arthropods (insects and crustaceans), and chordates (us and all other animals with a backbone or protobackbone), though things then move swiftly in the direction of obscurity. Among the latter we might list Gnathostomulida (marine worms), Cnidaria (jellyfish, medusae, anemones, and corals), and the delicate Priapulida (or little "penis worms"). Familiar or not, these are elemental divisions. Yet there is surprisingly little agreement on how many phyla there are or ought to be. Most biologists fix the total at about thirty, but some opt for a number in the low twenties, while Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life puts the number at a surprisingly robust eighty-nine. It depends on where you decide to make your divisions--whether you are a "lumper" or a "splitter," as they say in the biological world.