A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition

by Bill Bryson

  In the late 1980s a palaeontologist from the Milwaukee Public Museum, Peter Sheehan, decided to conduct an experiment. Using 200 volunteers, he made a painstaking census of a well-defined, but also well-picked-over, area of the famous Hell Creek Formation in Montana. Sifting meticulously, the volunteers collected every last tooth and vertebra and chip of bone—everything that had been overlooked by previous diggers. The work took three years. When they had finished, they found that they had more than tripled—for the planet—the number of dinosaur fossils from the late Cretaceous. The survey established that dinosaurs remained numerous right up to the time of the KT impact. “There is no reason to believe that the dinosaurs were dying out gradually during the last three million years of the Cretaceous,” Sheehan reported.

  We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.”

  We started this chapter with three points: life wants to be; life doesn’t always want to be much; life from time to time goes extinct. To this we may add a fourth: life goes on. And often, as we shall see, it goes on in ways that are decidedly amazing.

  Two of the 22 million zoological specimens preserved in alcohol in the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London. These particular ones were collected by Charles Darwin during his voyage aboard HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. (Credit 23.1)

  THE RICHNESS OF BEING

  Here and there in the Natural History Museum in London, built into recesses along the underlit corridors or standing between glass cases of minerals and ostrich eggs and a century or so of other productive clutter, are secret doors—at least secret in the sense that there is nothing about them to attract the visitor’s notice. Occasionally you might see someone with the distracted manner and interestingly wilful hair that mark the scholar emerge from one of the doors and hasten down a corridor, probably to disappear through another door a little further on, but this is a relatively rare event. For the most part the doors stay shut, giving no hint that beyond them exists another—a parallel—Natural History Museum as vast as, and in many ways more wonderful than, the one the public knows and adores.

  The Natural History Museum contains some seventy million objects from every realm of life and every corner of the planet, with another hundred thousand or so added to the collection each year, but it is really only behind the scenes that you get a sense of what a treasure house this is. In cupboards and cabinets and long rooms full of close-packed shelves are kept tens of thousands of pickled animals in bottles, millions of insects pinned to squares of card, drawers of shiny molluscs, bones of dinosaurs, skulls of early humans, endless folders of neatly pressed plants. It is a little like wandering through Darwin’s brain. The spirit room alone holds 15 miles of shelving containing jar upon jar of animals preserved in methylated spirit.

  Back here are specimens collected by Joseph Banks in Australia, Alexander von Humboldt in Amazonia and Darwin on the Beagle voyage—and much else that is either very rare or historically important or both. Many people would love to get their hands on these things. A few actually have. In 1954 the museum acquired an outstanding ornithological collection from the estate of a devoted collector named Richard Meinertzhagen, author of Birds of Arabia, among other scholarly works. Meinertzhagen had been a faithful attendee of the museum for years, coming almost daily to take notes for the production of his books and monographs. When the crates arrived, the curators excitedly levered them open to see what they had been left and were surprised, to put it mildly, to discover that a very large number of specimens bore the museum’s own labels. Mr. Meinertzhagen, it turned out, had been helping himself to their collections for years. It explained his habit of wearing a large overcoat even during warm weather.

  A few years later a charming old regular in the molluscs department—“quite a distinguished gentleman,” I was told—was caught inserting valued sea shells into the hollow legs of his Zimmer frame.

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything in here that somebody somewhere doesn’t covet,” Richard Fortey said with a thoughtful air as he gave me a tour of the beguiling world that is the behind-the-scenes part of the museum. We wandered through a confusion of departments where people sat at large tables doing intent, investigative things with arthropods and palm fronds and boxes of yellowed bones. Everywhere there was an air of unhurried thoroughness, of people being engaged in a gigantic endeavour that could never be completed and mustn’t be rushed. In 1967, I had read, the museum issued its report on the John Murray Expedition, an Indian Ocean survey, forty-four years after the expedition had concluded. This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly-looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down.

  A drawerful of shells from the collection of England’s greatest eighteenth-century botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, some of which were collected during the first voyage of Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1771. (Credit 23.1a)

  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 favour 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 rainforests 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 subj
ect. “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, Warnstorfia 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, 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.

  The Scottish botanist Robert Brown, painted in about 1845 when he was head of the botany department at the Natural History Museum in London. (Credit 23.2)

  “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.

  Three specimens of Toona ciliata, a type of red cedar, collected by Brown in 1804 during the first circumnavigation of Australia. (Credit 23.2a)

  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 £600,000 in today’s money, to take 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 tsar who thought he was mad and refused to honour 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.

  Sir Joseph Banks as portrayed by Sir Joshua Reynolds soon after his return from the three-year-long Endeavour voyage, the greatest botanical expedition in history. (Credit 23.3)

  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 £125,000 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).

  Clianthus puniceus, or parrot’s bill, from New Zealand, one of 30,000 specimens collected by Banks and his assistants. (Credit 23.4)

  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 th
e 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.

  Carolus Linnaeus, the eccentric but influential Swedish naturalist, who made it his life’s work to classify all living things systematically. (Credit 23.5)

  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 “vulva,” “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 behaviour 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.