The publication of Order Out of Chaos: Linnaean Plant Names and Their Types in 2007 marks the triumphant completion of the project: all 9,131 of Linnaeus’ names that map out the beginnings of the chart of the botanical world are now at last properly fixed for future generations. Every name has its identity hitched to a type specimen. This is the opposite extreme of the kind of science that chases a result in the short term to make a big splash in the New York Times. But is there not something enormously admirable about a project completed after twenty-six years of scholarly research? To give an example from one small part of the work: Linnaeus described and named twenty-seven species of the genus Solanum from the New World. Solanum is the genus that includes the tomato and potato, so it is of considerable importance commercially, especially now as genes of its close relatives are being investigated in case they confer natural immunity to disease. Obviously it is necessary to know how many species there are, and what to call them, before anyone can get on with the business of plant breeding. In 1990, specimens were selected as types for all the Linnaean species. It is hardly surprising to learn that many of these types were chosen from the Linnaean collection—the herbarium sheets that once belonged to the master. What may be more surprising is that these sheets are not in the University of Uppsala, Linnaeus’ home campus in Sweden, but in the middle of the west end of London, in Piccadilly, just opposite Fortnum and Mason’s—the famous grocer. As visitors pass through the entrance facing the Royal Academy in Burlington House on the north side of Piccadilly, on the other side of the road from Fortnum’s, they might notice on the left a much more modest entrance to the Linnean Society of London.*15 In the basement of the Linnean Society there is a well-protected and air-conditioned store that contains the herbarium of Linnaeus himself. It has a door like that of a bank vault, appropriate enough for the treasure it contains. The collection fetched up in London because Sir James Edward Smith bought it from Linnaeus’ widow for the sum of £1,050 in 1783. He certainly got a bargain, regardless of those tedious calculations that tell you how much that money would be worth today, for he had purchased something timeless. Because of inefficiency or indecision, the Swedish government did not make up its mind quickly enough to purchase the collection of its most famous scientific son, and Smith stepped in. The Swedes realized their mistake and dispatched a man o’ war to try and overtake the collection as it sailed on its way to England. Fortunately for the Linnean Society, the collection got away. I doubt whether an herbarium has ever before or since been the object of a diplomatic incident. The collection formed the nucleus around which the Society grew from its foundation in 1788, with Smith interminably as its President. From this famous collection the types of the Linnaean tomatoes were selected.
The Linnean Society is the “club” to which many Natural History Museum employees belong. It is the normal place for biologists who study whole organisms to meet; it is also the oldest biological society in the world. It was established for “the cultivation of the science of natural history in all its branches,” as its Charter states. The Geological Society lies opposite the Linnean on the other wing of Burlington House, and has a similarly distinguished history in the earth sciences. Just around the corner are the astronomers and the antiquaries, and the chemists are also nearby. An agglomeration of learned societies has no collective noun, although a “disputation of societies” comes to mind. However, I do not suppose that any current Fellow of the Linnean Society would dispute that the paper presented on 1 July 1858 represented the most important occasion in the Society’s history, for this was when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace jointly presented the “first draft” of the Theory of Evolution. These few minutes reset the agenda for biology, and indeed much of society; and, of course, changed the meaning of all those herbarium sheets now stored so carefully beneath the street in bustling Piccadilly. The many Solanum species, sharing their distinctive pointy flowers and succulent fruits, were not specially created each to its own design but were descended from a common ancestor. Fundamental resemblance implied evolutionary relationship. So it was possible to work out how organisms were related one to another: this goal of describing phylogeny followed logically, and thereby set a research programme for research scientists at the Natural History Museum and its sister institutions around the world.
One of the sheets from the herbarium of Linnaeus in the Linnean Society of London. This is larkspur, Delphinium consolidum.
The President of the Linnean Society would preside over a different body after 1858, even if the faces before him were the same as before. I should add that he would preside from what is almost certainly one of the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. It is made of crocodile hide, and I have watched successive Presidents wriggle uncomfortably about on it in the famous if incommodious lecture room, while portraits of Darwin and Wallace look sternly on. By contrast, the library upstairs is comfortable, bright and spacious, its two floors lined with books and attractively classically columned, giving on to an airy atrium with bays commanding a view of Piccadilly. There is much to entertain the natural history bibliophile on the crowded shelves. The library is just the place for colleagues to gather to discuss the evolution of daisies or the parasites of fishes over a glass of wine after the formal presentations downstairs. The President will mull over business with the Secretaries. Hobby-horses will be ridden, bees will buzz in bonnets. Brian Gardiner, formerly Professor of Zoology in London, might well be pressing the case for the relative neglect of A. R. Wallace compared with the near sanctification (in an agnostic kind of way) of C. Darwin. He has a point. A special fund was set up to rescue Wallace’s monument from overgrowth and collapse, whereas Darwin’s house and environs at Down are applying to become a World Heritage Site. Every aspect of the great man’s life has been the subject of biography, and usually several. Quite often somebody will be patiently explaining to someone else why their own particular organism is the best way to understand this evolutionary process or that.
The expert in the Natural History Museum on Solanum and its relatives is Dr. Sandra Knapp. She occupies another of the alcoves in the General Herbarium, one on the other side of the vault from Charlie Jarvis. It is difficult to describe Sandy as occupying any particular space, since she moves so frenetically around the Museum and seems to recruit all available spaces unto herself. She is one of a growing number of Americans on the staff in London—which is a measure of the increasingly international stance of the scientific research. She exemplifies the very best qualities of her nation—dynamic and enthusiastic, absolutely devoted to the cause of floras, good humoured, and completely without regard for the more ludicrous side of institutional life. Like me, she spends much time rooting around in piles of papers looking for something that has gone astray; unlike me, she usually finds it. Although now touched with grey, she is effectively ageless, so long as she can tap into the secret supply of energy to which she has exceptional access. The flowering plant family that includes the tomato is known as the Solanacea, and comprises about six thousand species belonging to about ninety genera: that is a lot to know about, pace the beetles. It is sometimes known as the nightshade family, because it includes the poisonous deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, which was also one of the first effective medicinal plants described by the old herbalists, although its specific name refers to its other use as a pupil dilator, allegedly to make women more attractive: la donna è bella. The species included in Solanaceae range in form from small trees with big leaves living in rainforests to dry, spiky herbs that are confined to deserts. The family is almost globally distributed.
Sandy’s work has been directed particularly at the genus Solanum itself, which is one of the most diverse genera of the plant world, for it embraces something like 1,500 to 2,000 species, including some of those most important for the nourishment of the human race. I exclude another solanacean plant, tobacco (Nicotiana), from this role. Sandy has done a great deal of fieldwork in the Andes in search of new or forgotten Solanums, an
d nothing gives her greater pleasure than making an unexpected discovery on some remote mountain slope. She boils over with enthusiasm at the mere prospect of a forthcoming expedition. Many of these out-of-the-way places are hardly known botanically. Members of the tomato family are not inconspicuous little weeds for the most part, but Sandy has discovered and named fifteen species new to science, as well as clarifying the meaning of many previously named varieties. In the process of collecting her particular plants, she has also collected many more belonging to other families, and this has resulted in the naming and description of dozens of new species. Since the possible medicinal properties of these plants are unknown, this gives a very practical meaning to botanical exploration. Who knows if some small herb may not cure the world of its outstanding ills? Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature’s inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use. It almost goes without saying that molecular sequences have been extracted from these Solanum plants to reconstruct their evolutionary history. The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is one of the few plants to have its genome well on the way to being sequenced. There are projects afoot to work out how the tomato genome can be improved and made more disease-resistant in an environmentally sensible way. These include SOL, the International Solanaceae genomics project, which is promoting and collating all the new molecular information from the family. But everything in research depends on having a sound taxonomy of the plants concerned. If you don’t know what to call it, you don’t know how to study it.
For many years Sandy has been organizing and contributing to a huge co-operative effort to describe and compile the total flora of the central part of the Americas—including the southern part of Mexico and the central American republics. This is the first major flora in Spanish designed to help local botanists with recognizing and collecting their flowers and ferns, and will be a benchmark in the conservation of little-known species. It is called—accurately, if inelegantly—Flora Mesoamericana. As a model of international co-operation it is exemplary; besides the Natural History Museum in London, the co-organizers are the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and that most distinguished of United States conservation bodies, the Missouri Botanic Garden. The seventh volume has just been published, but it will eventually run to ten volumes. The scholarly works are published alongside field guides for the use of native peoples and local botanists. This should go some way to breaking down suspicions of botanists as “thieves” coming in to “steal” the herbal secrets of endemic peoples. Flora Mesoamericana follows a long tradition of major floras. Long before I joined the Natural History Museum, a great work on African plants, Flora Zambesiaca, had begun in 1960 and now extends to thirty-two published volumes. According to the arcane formula of the Morton Agreement this work is Kew Garden’s responsibility, and remains so, but this did not stop Edmund Launert spending much of his working life upon it as a Museum staff member. Edmund is a small rotund German with a penchant for cigars, which kept the Senior Common Room bathed in fragrance in my early days. He has managed to write standard works on orchid cultivation, medicinal plants and scent bottles—on which he is an authority—as well as contributing to major floras and being the world’s expert on African grasses. He is also a marvellously humorous storyteller, to which a relict German accent adds the final touch; more than one story in this book owes its origin to Edmund.
Floras go back to the early days of botany, although as we have seen they were originally accounts of the plants of famous gardens as much as of regions. Flora Mesoamericana breaks new ground in exploiting the internet to make it available to those who wish to use it in the field. There is a special online version provided with multiple indices so that the confused botanist can soon find a source of illustration for the species before him, and the correct name for it. On a more modest scale, field guides to the plants of particular botanical “hot spots” are useful to many amateur devotees of rare and interesting flowers. Islands in particular have endemic species, many delightful, and some in need of protection. Sandy’s colleague Bob Press has compiled a flora of Madeira, for example, which helps the field botanist with recognition of that island’s many special plants. In my view these are as important a contribution as specialized floras, all the more so because they broadcast our expertise so widely. My field guides to the British flora are the most dog-eared of all my books, and if wear is proportionate to affection, they must also be the most loved.
With the spread of internet storage and access for natural history information, there is an important issue about what constitutes publication, and even whether we need conventional books at all. There is no question that the web is an extraordinary resource for botanists, zoologists, entomologists and palaeontologists. If information can be freely posted on the web, the question needs to be asked whether it is necessary to buy a book at great expense that merely repeats the same information in printed form. Do trees have to be sacrificed for nothing? Identification does not require fat manuals. Botanists in particular love keys: dichotomizing keys. These have a very long tradition in botany and mycology, and I rather like them myself. For example, if you know the genus of the plant before you and want to determine the species, you need a key to that genus; it might begin: flowers blue or flowers red—your first choice. Once you have decided that the flower in front of you is red, you then go to the next series of choices, which might be: leaves entire or leaves divided. Leaves entire—good! Next choice: stem smooth or stem hairy—undoubtedly the latter. By now, you might have arrived at a species name—the one with red flowers, entire leaves and hairy stems—say Rubrifloria hairystemmia (to make one up). We could have finished up with a species with blue flowers, divided leaves and smooth stems—say Coeruliflora glabristemma (to make up another one). The dichotomizing key really is quite simple—in theory. However, if the species in question belongs to a genus like Solanum with more than a thousand species, negotiating one’s way through a key can become quite tricky. It is very easy to take a wrong turn somewhere and finish up with the wrong name. It’s rather like missing a vital turning off a trunk road and finishing up at Peebles, or in a DIY superstore. But with a little practice a key is a great asset—and it is ideally suited to placing on the web.
There are already dozens, if not hundreds, of such keys available there. I find this development entirely positive. It takes the scientist out of his turreted redoubt in one of the remote corners of Gormenghast and places him or her at the disposal of all interested parties around the world. It passes on expertise acquired through hours of burrowing through obscure tomes so that anyone can use it. This is a kind of democracy of learning, a generous gift from the cognoscenti to those who wish to learn. But it does not invalidate the field guide or the monograph. It will still be a pleasure to take a pocket book into the flower-laden roadsides and hills in Madeira for consultation. You could take a computer, and summon up the data stored in the great virtual mind, but—if one is honest—it is easier to take out a pocket book from the anorak and leaf through a friendly field guide. Or, for the definitive illustration of a plant, surely the old skills of the botanical artist still have a place. I would hate to think that the sublime artistry of a latter-day Ehret could be outflanked by an efficient digital camera. I hope that this is not mere sentimentality or artistic snobbery on my part. Nobody could dispute that colour photography of wildlife has improved enormously—good photography has become an everyday achievement. But this quotidian competence cannot be a substitute for the exquisite productions of a botanical artist, where the essence of the plant is distilled into a plate with all the assurance of a Van Dyck nailing character into the span of a canvas. Let us celebrate both the advances in technology that make identification of organisms a common right, and the esoteric skills and experience of specialists that deserve to live on.
Whe
re the web will have the greatest impact is in making available technical information and illustrations to experts and amateurs around the world interested in particular animals or plants. This applies across the Natural History Museum, and not just to botany. You could imagine a field botanist in base camp in the jungles of Indonesia having a hunch about the identity of a particular plant—and instantly conjuring up the type material on his computer to make a comparison there and then. This is one way to turn a national museum into a truly global resource, and, thanks to their long history of exotic collections, one with particular use in the developing world. My palaeontological colleague Andrew Smith is compiling a catalogue available on the web of all the genera of sea urchins (echinoids), including, naturally, many known only from fossils. There are beautiful photographs of museum specimens from several views, descriptive notes and accounts of geological occurrence. The numerous “hits” on the site from all around the world testify to the usefulness of such an online resource. The arachnologists—spider people—have a web-based guide to European species, while Norman Platnick from the American Museum of Natural History is compiling a global catalogue of more recent spider literature. The list of useful guides, catalogues and keys on the web is getting longer every day. Type almost any scientific name into Google and an image will be recruited from somewhere or other. What these images do not necessarily have is the imprimatur of somebody who really knows their stuff, because there is little quality control on the identifications placed on the web. Some of the identifications could well be wrong, and thus do more harm than good. The role of the expert will more and more be to validate such websites. Of course, even experts get it wrong from time to time, but an advantage of the web is that corrections and corrigenda do not have to wait for a paper publication.
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