Dry Storeroom No. 1

by Richard Fortey

  Encarsia perplexa—a parasitic wasp that preys on Aleurocanthus.

  The homemade field laboratory of Vane-Wright and friends on location in South-west Africa in the early 1970s.

  A termite mound in outback Australia: one of the insect world’s most sophisticated structures.

  Now thought to be related to cockroaches: the primitive termite Bifidtermes at work on wood; note wingless larvae (see Chapter 6).

  Laid out for study: an historically important collection of butterflies and moths made by Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin’s co-author on evolution.

  The cutting of thin sections through rocks opened a new world to petrologists. This is a porphyritic volcanic rock seen under polarized light (“crossed nicols”), including some large stripey twinned felspars and olivine (orange-pink) in a “sea” of much finer crystals. Modern equipment can investigate the chemistry of a single crystal.

  Living “tubeworms” covering Zooarium, a sulphide chimney named for its rich biota; Explorer Ridge, 2002.

  Deep-sea sulphide deposits: a manipulator arm holds a sample from a deep-sea chimney that has ceased activity, showing “fossil” vestimentiferan worm tubes. Such fossil deposits are now known to have a history of several hundred million years.

  A volcanic cone made of extraordinary carbonatite lava: Oldoinyo Lengai in Tanzania on the Great Rift Valley 120 km north-west of Arusha (see Chapter 7).

  The remote Nuratau Mountains of central Asia, Uzbekistan, home to rare species of minerals—some of which have only recently been discovered—as well as to the Severtzov wild sheep (Ovis ammon severtzovi).

  Rare and beautiful mineral crystals from the Kola Peninsula, Arctic Russia: Kovdorskite, a magnesium hydroxy phosphate.

  The cast taken from the original Koh-i-noor diamond, and (below it) the brilliantly recut version in the Crown Jewels.

  The rare and unusual ‘wheels’ of the mineral bournonite from Cornwall (chemically, it is copper lead antimony sulphide).

  The Latrobe gold nugget (NHM 6020): 717 gm of crystallized gold from Mt. Ivor, Victoria, Australia.

  The “accursed amethyst” of Edward Heron-Allen, now hidden in a drawer in the Mineralogy Collections. Don’t contemplate it for too long (Chapter 7).

  ARTISTIC TREASURES KEPT SAFELY IN LIBRARIES

  A confederation of owls from Audubon’s Birds of America (1835–38), Plate 432; the species are Athene cunicularia, A. noctua, Glaucidium gnoma and Asio flammeus.

  From Ferdinand Bauer’s Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae (1816): the gymea lily Doryanthes excelsa.

  Georg Dionysius Ehret (1707–70): Senecio pseudoarnica Less, or Seaside ragwort, sketch 11 from Ehret’s original drawings of plants from Newfoundland. Joseph Banks started his botanical reputation with an expedition to Newfoundland in 1766.

  I will briefly greet the herpetologists, whose collections include pallid pythons packed like intestines into tall jars. Nick Arnold is the lizard man famed for work showing how lizard species coexist and recognize one another with curious dances, how different species are found on different islands, and how speciation events in turn relate to the islands’ geological history. For the more general naturalist, Nick wrote the definitive herpetological guide to Europe, Reptiles and Amphibia of Europe (2003). Garth Underwood was the snake man and a kind of inverse Peter Purves, being a man of quiet sober dedication and reticence who continued to work with scarcely diminished vigour until his death at eighty-three in 2002. Or we might visit some people who study at the diminutive end of the zoological spectrum; let’s call in to meet John Lambshead, who is a “nematode” man. Nematodes, or roundworms, are tiny but ubiquitous animals—any small handful of soil will have many nematodes in it. Unless you are a nematode man, I have to say that they have a somewhat limited aesthetic appeal. I usually see them wriggling across the field of view when I have been examining small fungi under the microscope. Furthermore, the parasitic habit has arisen on many more occasions in the nematodes than is the case in schistosomes. In nature, it is always an attractive option to bludge a living, as an Australian might say. Some are serious root pests. Another, but useful, nematode is the model organism Coenorhabditis elegans, which was so important in unravelling the genome and how it works. In the sea, nematodes can be found in great numbers in the mud anywhere from shallow-water habitats to the deepest part of the ocean trenches: so even a small grab sample can yield up plenty of evidence. The composition of the nematode population provides a very good indication of the level of pollution, for there are species that thrive under just about any nasty conditions, others that prove that everything is as it should be. John Lambshead has been much concerned with using nematodes to monitor the state of health of the sea floor, a matter that should be on the radar of any politician claiming green credentials. He is rather a dramatic man to be paired with such undramatic animals. With a ready smile, expansive gestures and hypnotic eyes, he is reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner, except that he “stoppeth one in three” to explain the importance of nematodes in understanding habitat diversity. There are actually far too many nematodes to name them all formally, and too few nematode men to do it, so a library of molecular sequences characterizing species as yet unnamed has been developed. It is quite practical to do environmental monitoring with a cast of characters for which the Linnaean binomial is still waiting in the wings.

  The author standing in a typical Museum office (his own is rather less tidy)

  The Darwin Centre encourages the public to come into the collections on special tours. Some of the scientists occasionally feel that they, too, are another set of specimens, laid out for inspection by amiably curious visitors. Regular lectures about the research work of the Museum in the Darwin Centre have been a success in opening our arcane world to scrutiny. The boffins come blinking into the light, and most of them love it. For their part, the audience like to see into the hidden world behind the galleries. Charles Darwin himself is not infrequently mentioned on these occasions—how can it be otherwise in this cathedral to his ideas, where many of his specimens still reside? No other scientist has given his name to so much. The capital of Northern Territories, Australia, is simply Darwin; Mount Darwin is the highest mountain in Tierra del Fuego. Several variations on Charles Darwin Research Institutes are scattered around the world. There are numerous darwini species names. He is celebrated in Darwin’s finch, fish, frog, amphisbaenid, gecko, barnacle, sea slug, snail, beetle, cricket and the lowly thrip (and many more insects besides); two mice, one not seen in Galapagos since 1930, and the other a leaf-eared mouse under threat in South America; several spectacular fossils and numerous plants: all darwini. There is even a computer game called Darwinia. The endemic Australian shrub of the same name (Darwinia) is, however, named for Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus—not that you could tell from the name alone.

  Newton or Galileo do not come anywhere near in profligacy of eponyms; perhaps the closest approach is Louis Pasteur in France, if you allow the inclusion of street names. What French town worth its name does not have a Rue Pasteur not far from its Rue Victor Hugo? And if Darwin has his-ism, Darwinism, then Pasteur has his-ization, pasteurization, although he has lost his capital letter in English. Is it conceivable that anyone would now say that they don’t “believe” in pasteurization? It would be rather like saying they don’t believe in germs or microbes, or even hygiene. Yet a comparable denial of Darwinism has apparently been growing in the last decades. Darwin and Pasteur were—very approximately—contemporaries, so those who deny Darwinian evolution are seeking to push back knowledge to some time before the 1850s. Imagine if it were medicine! I sometimes wonder whether those who disavow Darwin should also eschew the medical treatments that have been developed thanks to the insights evolutionary understanding has provided. I mean things like genetic disorders, or rapidly changing viruses like the one that causes AIDS, or cancer treatments arising from the discovery of oncogenes. Such unbelievers could still have most surgery with a clear conscience. As fo
r the rest, well, I believe Thomas Culpeper had some good herbal remedies for the “bluddie flux.”

  5

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  Theatre of Plants

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  Laying out a plant for pressing is like laying out a corpse before a wake. Everything must be in its proper place: the arms by the side, the visage upwards showing the best face in the circumstances, the clothes perfectly arranged. The skilled plant presser moves with the trained efficiency of a mortician. Foliage is laid out just like a best frock to present its frills and furbelows; flowers are displayed to show their important features; roots are sometimes appended like a bundled tribute. The whole business is carried out automatically and without fuss. But, unlike the doomed cadaver, the laid-out plant is destined to endure, its spread-eagled best a voucher for as long as collections last. Everything is done to make sure that the specimen does not decay like its companions in field or forest. The paper on which it is laid out is acid-free, absorbent, of course, but superior to the kind of blotting paper we used as children. Wayward sprigs are held in place by paste. Covered by another sheet of paper like a winding-sheet, the plant will take its place in a pile destined for the flower presses. Some of these contraptions would be familiar to students of Linnaeus himself, comprising two opposing flat metallic plates between which the pile of sheets is sandwiched, the whole then being compressed by a mighty screw, the winding arm of which has massive brass balls at either end. The process was first described in print by the Flemish savant Adrianus Spigelius in his book Isagoges in rem herbarium (1606). The end product is a herbarium sheet, which is often rather beautiful. I have to assume that this aesthetic sense is mostly an accident, but there is often something that recalls the old herbals about the layout of the plants on the sheet. The savants who prepared early floras of useful or medicinal plants used the woodcut plates illustrating their subjects as a demonstration of artistry. The plants seem to grow across the pages, but often in a somewhat formal way, as if to make the best use of the space available.

  Herbarium sheets laid out for inspection in the General Herbarium: preserved in perpetuity

  These practical works long predate Linnaeus, and their systematic arrangement is usually one of medical virtue rather than biological affinity. I have already mentioned Leonhard Fuchs, whose De historia stirpia (1542) is a landmark in the portrayal of flowering plants, for both accuracy and beauty, but some might regard the illustrations by Hans Weiditz in the work of Otto Brunfels as even finer. They include many life studies of plants found growing near Brunfels’ home in Berne, Switzerland, where he was a Lutheran pastor. It would be difficult to decide which of the genera subsequently named after these pioneers is the more showy: Brunfelsia or Fuchsia. The latter is certainly the more ubiquitous in gardens. John Gerarde’s Herball, or General Historie of Plants (1597) is perhaps the best known of these early works, but the woodblocks made by Tabernaemontanus*11 yield more schematic prints that seem well on their way to becoming the kind of vigorous, twining growth featured on William Morris’ wallpapers. I do not suppose for a moment that those who lay out herbarium sheets consciously follow the herbals, but there may be an instinctive tendency to use space in a satisfying way that does not “waste” it. There is one way to do the job that seems intuitively right. If we follow the democratic views of the German artist Joseph Beuys, it could be that a skilled preparator of plants just can’t help making art.

  An illustration of Clematis vitalba from an old herbal of Leonhard Fuchs (1542) with the plant laid out decoratively upon the plate

  Naturally, you cannot press a banana or a cactus or a tuber: these are popped in jars just like any toad or lumpfish.

  Once hidden away safely in their folders, dried plants are great survivors. There are tiny malevolent creatures like booklice that will make a meal of glue, and damp is simply lethal to any stored dried material, but given a little care a herbarium is a safe place for a permanent repository. Some of the oldest specimens in the Natural History Museum are herbarium sheets that came from the original collections of Sir Hans Sloane, and so root back to the very foundations of the BM. The Sloane Herbarium includes a specimen of cacao (Theobroma cacao), a species that he described from his extensive natural history collections from Jamaica, where he had been the personal physician to the Duke of Albemarle early in his career. He appreciated the virtues of a drink made from mixing milk and chocolate: his own recipe, “Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate,” was sold by Cadbury’s until well into the nineteenth century. In this age of bijou chocolatières, it may be time to revive it. Sloane purchased or inherited a number of important herbarium collections at a time when the botanical world was just being explored from Europe. He acquired the first collections from the Cape in South Africa, a region now renowned as one of the most botanically diverse; he bought the then unique Japanese collection of Engelbert Kaempfer, who died in 1716; likewise the collections of James Petiver, who died in 1718, replete with North American species. He was voracious in acquisition, a true collector. He also outlived his rivals, which helps if you happen to have a bottomless purse. By the time he died as a very old man, his collections filled his manor house in Chelsea, which was then an almost rural part of London. In addition to the 100,000 specimens, 50,000 books and 3,500 manuscripts, and so on, that formed the nucleus of the British Museum, there were 334 herbarium volumes—Sloane’s Hortus siccus, literally his “dry garden.” These have been moved, and moved again through the several transmogrifications of the BM. The first move was from Sloane Manor to Montagu House in Bloomsbury in 1756—which became the original British Museum. In the nineteenth century, as the collections continued to grow, the herbarium was moved to a room in Smirke’s new grandiose neoclassical edifice, where the antiquities and drawings remain today, and where the Elgin Marbles still draw the crowds. Finally, the famous volumes were transferred to Waterhouse’s purpose-built extravaganza in South Kensington, and long may they remain there.

  The Sloane Herbarium has survived better than most of his other collections (but see Chapter 1); specimens mounted on paper truly do defy time and decay. Two hundred and sixty-five volumes are now housed in a Special Collections room, with controlled humidity and temperature and filtered air—they have never been so well cared for in their quarter-millennium history. As for his zoological specimens, they have fallen foul of carpet beetle and moth. The stuffed birds and mammals have been eaten away—even the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century “preservatives,” which were mostly poisonous compounds of arsenic and mercury, probably did more harm than good. It was reported that in 1806 “most objects of the Sloane collections were in an advanced state of decomposition, and they were buried or committed to the flames one after another. Dr. Shaw [then the man in charge] has a burning every year; he called them his cremations.” Thus passed from the world one of the founding collections of the British Museum, gobbled first by larvae and then by fire. The curators had no choice in their actions, as they did not wish to infect the rest of the collections. A nervous awareness of pests has been a preoccupation of the Museum staff ever since.

  The word “botany” may call to mind flower presses, and earnest ramblers bending over a small weed in a nature reserve, but it has a much wider compass than just flowering plants. The Botany Department has a whole floor devoted to cryptogams. This is one part of the Natural History Museum that has hardly altered since I joined the organization. Tucked away in the attic at the east end of the Museum, it comprises an open gallery under a low roof with many bays surrounded by old polished cabinets. Curators are sequestered away in the bays like grubs inside a peach: they can be found if you are sufficiently determined to winkle behind the bookcases and piles of folders, but you feel that they wriggle into the light reluctantly. “Cryptogam”(Greek: “hidden marriage”) is a broad term for plants that have “hidden” reproduction, rather than replicating themselves from obvious things like seeds. It is an old term, going back to the time of Linnaeus, when it was still unrecognized
that plants could reproduce from minute propagules like spores—which often look to the naked eye like nothing more than brown dust. It seemed against common sense that something so minute might have the potential for producing progeny. The development of the modern microscope allowed a different view. So here in the Cryptogamic Herbarium there are the experts on ferns, mosses, liverworts, algae and lichens: these are the organisms that decorate branches and stream banks, paint rocks in every colour in the palette sold by Windsor and Newton, and grace rock pools with fronds and feathers of red, brown and green weeds that toss with the tides. To the rest of the Museum such plants are known simply as “Crypts.” The Crypts have their own library, and their own ways.

  For many years this part of the Museum also included experts on fungi, the mycologists; however, the appropriate collections were transferred to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1969 and 1976. I have always felt a particular connection to John Ramsbottom, who was Keeper of Botany for an astonishingly long period between 1930 and 1950, and was also a distinguished mycologist. Ramsbottom wrote one of the celebrated New Naturalist series: Mushrooms and Toadstools (1953). As a young naturalist I was entranced by his blend of esoteric learning and scientific expertise; a mixture of scholarship, history and science which seemed to make nonsense of C. P. Snow’s notion of the “two cultures”—arts and sciences. Ramsbottom recognized only one seamless culture, and could combine quotations from Pliny or sixteenth-century herbals, or lines from little-known books of poetry, with the discoveries of twentieth-century microscopists or chemists. From his writing I intuited a great depth of scholarly knowledge combined with an appreciation of fungi in their natural habitat, and a rather dry humour buried somewhere below that. There is a diverting preface from the editor of the New Naturalist series noting that the original manuscript submitted by John Ramsbottom had been twice as long as the version finally published and “even then, he complained that much had to be omitted.” The final book is replete with footnotes, and sections set in very small type. I can easily imagine the battle between editor and scholarly author, the one for trimming, the other for expansion, and the resulting selection of compromises. I am glad that the cutting tendency did not eliminate some curious little footnotes, such as one that records, “At Clerkenwell Police Court in March, 1937, the defence argued that a man accused of being drunk in charge of a motor car was suffering from the effects of a rather liberal meal of mushrooms.” He does not record how this went down in court, although it sounds like a useful defence to have up one’s sleeve should the need arise.*12