by A. S. Byatt
I would wake, and shake myself, and say to Vera that I’d been dreaming. And Vera would not ask what about, and I wouldn’t say. We resembled each other in that.
So what did we talk about? She had become wholly engrossed in the problem of the marble connection. She would report minor triumphs—she had identified Cyanea as the “Lion’s-mane” organism in the short story by Conan Doyle in which a man is killed by something that leaves a network of burning weals on his back. She had attributed the name, tentatively, to a sea-green marble containing a fine tentacular swirl of reddish hairs. She marched columns across her table—plant-names, insect-names, sea-creatures—and always found that she had two marbles, or three, to one name, or two or three names to one marble. I think she was beginning to know them almost as well as their original collector, a difficult feat, with several hundred small glass spheres and no fixed taxonomy. She would get out particular choice ones in the evening for my delectation, bright primary colours one night, subtly shaded all-greens another. We developed a ritual of holding them up and staring into them, like many-coloured crystal balls with a variety of fantastic features.
I was still, doggedly, pursuing my own task of cataloguing Destry-Scholes’s wayward card collection. Possibly under the influence of the marble taxonomy I thought I detected a subset of cards on taxonomic collections. The prize exhibit in this was Pearson’s account of Galton’s specimens of glass eyes and hair.
Card no. 90
In the test of the Eye and Hair Colours Galton used artificial glass eyes respectively dark blue, blue, grey, dark grey, brown grey (green, light hazel), brown, dark brown, black. He also used standard samples of hair: flaxen, light brown, dark brown, black and 3 shades of red: fair red (golden), red, dark red (chestnut auburn). He was certainly the first to introduce standard scales of this kind, and, what is more, to realise the difficulty of reproducing them. Such eye and hair scales are common enough now, but were by no means so in 1882, yet the difficulty remains of reproducing them accurately even when manufactured by one firm. The glass eyes of the two standard scales are found not to have the same types of pigments in them, and the spunglass silk used for standard hair scales not always the same amount of dye.
Galton felt keenly the need for a standard and permanent set of colours, and made a suggestion on this point of great value. In 1869 he had been struck by the great variety of permanent colours which are produced for mosaic work. He had been over the Fabbrica of mosaics attached to the Vatican and seen their 25,000 numbered trays or bins of coloured mosaic. He realised at once the opportunity thus afforded not only for the establishment of a general colour scale in this country, but, as the mosaics were manufactured for the representation of human figures among other things, for skin, hair and eye-colour scales for anthropometric purposes.
Card no. 91 Feb. 3.1870. Letter to Science and
Art Department, South Kensington, from FG
I beg to propose that the authorities of the South Kensington Art Department should make application to the Pope for mosaic tablets containing in order specimens of each of their 25,000 bins to be suspended in the Museum for the purpose of reference as a standard of colour …
It might be disposed as a frieze running along the wall at a height convenient for reference, the bits of mosaic perhaps arranged in tablets of 100 containing ten ranks and ten files, with dark lines at the 5th division each way for convenience of immediately ascertaining the number appertaining to each several bit …
It might well be a subject for the subsequent consideration of the authorities of South Kensington whether they should not select by means of the large amount of skill and science at their disposal say one tenth of the Vatican series to create what might be called a South Kensington scale of colours, and distribute identical copies of it in mosaic, which would occupy a space according to the above calculation of less than 10 feet X 8 feet among the art schools of the United Kingdom.
Card no. 92
Sixteen years later (1886) Galton returned to his suggestion impressed by the fading of the original paintings of Broca for skin tints, and by a further brief stay in Rome where he had again visited the Vatican factory … He now found that there were 40,000 bins of mosaics, and of these 10,762 were classified; they occupied 24 cases in each of which were 16 rows of 28 samples. The flesh tints appropriate to European nations were about 500 in number, so that the Vatican factory provided ample material for the selection of a series of tints such as anthropologists desired …
Mr. Odo Russell—later Lord Ampthill—our semiofficial representative at the Vatican (till 1870) was ultimately asked to inquire as to the feasibility of carrying out the scheme, “but the price asked by the Papal government was altogether excessive, and so the matter dropped.”
Card no. 93
Among matters which concern us in this chapter are standards for hair and eye colours. Here Galton directly suggests “glass spun by a glass blower for comparison with hair.” Thus before 1886 he had proposed sets of standard glass eyes, mosaics for skin colour and spun glass for hair; all 3 of these suggestions have been carried out in this century—by Germans—in the well-known eye-scale of Professor R. Martin, in Professor von Luschau’s skin-scale and Professor G. Fischer’s glass-silk hair scale. Thus the best of what we can do now, was suggested by Galton twenty to thirty years earlier.
A list of Ibsen’s medals and honours might make up part of this cluster on collections. Otherwise, why did Destry-Scholes bother to make a card of it? (It was not adjacent to any of the other items in this cluster. It was between the drafts made by Francis Galton of Erasmus Darwin’s tombstone, and a list of school exam results I haven’t identified—chemistry B+, religion C, pure maths B–, applied maths B+—maybe Destry-Scholes’s own, maybe not, there is no way of knowing. No date, either.
Card no. 132
Vasa Order. Medjidjie Order (Turkish) Commander Third Class, Danebrog, Order of St. Olaf, Knight, Saxe Ernestine Order, Knight First Class, honorary doctorate Uppsala, Order of St. Olaf Commander First Class, Great Cross of St. Olaf, Great Cross of Dannebrog Order, Great Cross of North Star.
Card no. 115
Voice from the grave to her who was my dear wife.
The two herbaria in the Museum. Let neither rats nor moths damage them. Let no naturalist steal a single plant. Take great care who is shown them. Valuable though they already are, they will be worth more as time goes on. They are the greatest collection the world has ever seen. Do not sell them for less than a thousand ducats. My son is not to have them because he never helped me in botany and does not love the subject; keep them for some son-in-law who may prove to be a botanist.
The shell cabinet is worth at least 12,000 dalers.
The insect cabinet cannot be kept for long, because of moth.
The mineral cabinet contains things of great value.
The library in my museums with all my books, is worth at least 3,000 copper dalers. Do not sell it, but give it to the Uppsala library. But my son may have my library in Uppsala at a valuation.
CL
Another passage, which I sent to be translated by Fulla Biefeld, turned out to be a description of Linnaeus’s workroom.
Card no. 117
You would have admired, enjoyed,—yes, quite fallen in love with his museum, to which all his students had access.
On one wall was his Lapp dress and other curiosities; on another side were big objects of the vegetable kingdom and a collection of mussels, and on the remaining two, his medical books, his scientific instruments, and his minerals. In a corner of the room, which was a high one, were the branches of a tree in which lived about thirty different kinds of tame birds, and in the window recesses stood great pots, filled with earth, for growing rare plants. It was a joy, too, to look at his collection of pressed plants, all gummed on sheets of paper; there were more than three thousand Swedish plants, both wild and cultivated, as well as many rarities from Lapland. Further, there were a thousand species of Swedish insects a
nd about the same number of Swedish stones, tastefully displayed in spacious boxes and arranged according to the entirely new system founded on his own observations.
Fulla Biefeld attached a note to this translation, asking if I was getting anywhere, and informing me that Linnaeus’s geological collection had been dispersed when the collections were sold by Fru Linnaea to James Edward Smith in 1784, to the great distress of the Swedish universities and government. Smith (aged twenty-four at the time) became the first President of the Linnean Society, which purchased what remained of the collections. Fulla Biefeld hoped to be back in London at some point for further study of some of Linnaeus’s type specimens. She would look me up. She was curious to see the results of my researches.
This explained a rather dry card (no. 128), which I append.
James Edward Smith. 26 large chests. 19,000 sheets of pressed plants. 3,200 insects. 1,500 shells. 700–800 pieces of coral. 2,500 mineral specimens. 2,500 books. 3,000 letters (to and from). various mss.
Card no. 129
Instruments designed by FG. Anthropometric, psychometric, meteorological et al. Many unidentified devices, and drawings of devices, whose purpose may now only be divined are collectively known in the Anthropometric Laboratory as Galton’s Toys.
Drill pantograph. Weather balloon. A lock. A lamp. A balance. A printing telegraph. A device for compounding six objects. A hyperscope. A wave engine. A heliostat. A “Tactor” machine. A machine for optical combination of images. An Iceland spar compounder. A measurement of resemblance machine. An instantaneous attitude snapper. Spectacles for divers. Whistles for high notes. A Pocket registrator. An instrument for testing the perception of tint differences. An instrument for measuring the movement of a limb.
Card no. 130 Substitutes
The substitutes for thread, string and cord are as follows:—Thongs cut spirally, like a watch spring out of a piece of leather or hide, and made pliant by working them round a stick; sinew and catgut; inner bark of trees—this is easily separated by long steeping in water, but chewing it is better; roots of trees, as the spruce-fir, split to the proper size; woodbines, runners, or pliant twigs twisted together. Some seaweeds—the only English one of which I have heard is the common olive-green weed called Chorda filum; it looks like a whip-thong, and sometimes grows to a length of thirty or forty feet; when half-dried, the skin is taken off and twisted into fishing-lines etc. Hay-bands; horsehair ropes, or even a few twisted hairs from the tail of a horse; the stems of numerous plants afford fibres that are more or less effective substitutes for hemp, those that are used by the natives of the country visited should be noticed; “Indian grass” is an animal substance attached to the ovaries of small sharks and some other fish of the same class.
In lashing things together with twigs, hay-bands, and the like, the way of securing the loose ends is not by means of a knot, which usually causes them to break, but by twisting the ends together until they “kink.” All faggots and trusses are secured in this way.
Vera remarked that Chorda filum was among the marble-taxonomy, as were mare’s tail and horsetail. I tracked this quotation down without much trouble to Galton’s Art of Travel, a wildly concrete book for the armchair voyager, which in happier days I had felt should be on sale in Puck’s Girdle (there is a David & Charles reprint currently available). There were other quotations from this work in the shoebox, including Galton’s belief that women make good bearers because they like carrying weights. Women, Galton said, became “the helpless dolls they were considered to be” by doing needlework in the boudoirs of baronial castles (“herded together like pigs”). “It is in the nature of woman to be fond of carrying weights; you may see them in omnibuses and carriages, always preferring to hold their baskets or their babies on their knees, to setting them down on the seats by their sides. A woman, whose modern dress includes I know not how many cubic feet of space, has hardly ever pockets of sufficient size to carry small articles; for she prefers to load her hands with a bag or other weighty object.”
Vera said much damage was done to women by carrying badly distributed weights. She had seen injuries and distortions directly due to manoeuvring pushchairs and heavy bags. She said Destry-Scholes and the personages appeared not to be much interested in women. I said Ibsen certainly had been—at least in young girls, he had collected young girls to flirt with. There were, however, no cards about that aspect of his life. Our discussion of Ibsen’s penchant for young girls called up obscurely my Strange Customer and his apparently desperate need. I said nothing to Vera about him, however. It wasn’t appropriate.
Card no. 193
Samuel John Galton (1753–1832) was very fond of animals. He kept many blood hounds; he loved birds, and wrote an unpretentious little book about them in 3 small volumes, with illustrations. He had a decidedly statistical bent, loving to arrange all kinds of data in parallel lines of corresponding lengths, and frequently using colour for distinction. My father, and others of Samuel Galton’s children, inherited this taste in a greater or lesser degree; it rose to an unreasoning instinct in one of his daughters. She must have been an acceptable customer to her bookbinder on that account, as the number of expensively bound volumes that she ordered from time to time, each neatly ruled in red, and stamped and assigned to some particular subject or year, is hardly credible. I begged for a bagful of them after her death, to keep as a psychological curiosity, and must have it still; the rest were destroyed. She must have collected these costly books to satisfy a pure instinct, for she turned them to no useful account, and rarely filled more than a single page, often not so much of each of them. She habitually used a treble inkstand, with black, red and blue inks, employing the distinctive colours with little reason, but rather with regard to their pictorial effect. She was perhaps not over-wise, yet she was by no means imbecile, and had many qualities that endeared her to her nephews and nieces.
Waiting for the return of Erik and Christophe became increasingly tense and painful. Their return was in a sense worse than anything I had feared—partly at least because of the over-excitement the waiting had induced in me, myself. I tried, of course, to be sensible and rational, worked harder and harder both on the photographs and the quotations, and on my work at Puck’s Girdle. I found several of Galton’s collections of fingerprints in the photograph box, including those of himself, various axe murderers and poisoners, and a gorilla from the London Zoo. There was obviously a way of cross-referring the photographs and the quotations, but where was it getting me? There was also a photograph of Galton, taken “as a criminal” by the police, as a sample, looking distinctly shifty and threatening. At Puck’s Girdle I was in a state of continuous terror—I am not a brave man—about the imminent return of Maurice Bossey. I sold some holidays in South Africa and in Cairo which made me think of Galton’s sojourns in those places, a gorilla-watching holiday in Rwanda, and some rather dubious sunbathing days in a club for under-thirties on Copacabana beach. I tried, in the interim, in a clumsy way, to reorganise my files on my computer there—id est, to remove all traces of any search made at the suggestion of Maurice Bossey, and moreover, any site he had shown an interest in, however innocent it appeared (“the Lost Kouroi of Hellas,” “In search of Youth Culture in Kuala Lumpur”). This had, since I am computationally inept, the effect of losing, temporarily or permanently, all sorts of other parts of what had been an orderly data-bank, of amalgamating fields and lists of clients, of inserting, shall we say the Lofoten Islands cruise into the tropical jungle (diminishing) in Belize and Guatemala. I tried, I seem to remember, not to think about resigning my job. But the job was so delightful because of the openness and insouciance of Erik and Christophe.