Seeing Further

by Bill Bryson

  In this sense Archaeopteryx became a kind of talisman for evolution. Owen was enough of a ‘Museum man’ to ensure that this fossil was safely curated, and part of any museum’s function is just that – to protect material regardless of the current explanations of its importance. The old bird has now been joined by half a dozen or so subsequent examples worldwide, but its importance has not diminished over the years. Periodically, it has been taken out from storage and re-evaluated. Sir Gavin de Beer described it in great detail in 1954. Twenty years later more bits of it were manually prepared, and new details revealed, and in the last few years the brain case of the early bird has been CAT-scanned and its endocast reconstructed. All these endeavours have served to confirm the transitional nature of Archaeopteryx – but have also confirmed that in most important functional respects it is closer to the birds than to the dinosaurs. This in turn has contributed to the debate about whether birds descended from one particular group of dinosaurs: most palaeontologists nowadays concur that they did. One might say that the meaning of Archaeopteryx has changed, while the information that has been extracted from this specimen (and other new discoveries) has increased fitfully as scientific hypotheses have shifted.

  I begin with the London specimen of Archaeopteryx because it is an emblem for the importance of collections in science. Collections provide the ground truth on which hypotheses are built. Physics has laboratories; systematic biology has collections. It would be misleading to claim that the millions of specimens stored in cabinets and bottles in the galleries of national natural history museums are all, individually, as important as the type specimen of Archaeopteryx. But well localised, properly documented natural history archives have been, and continue to be, central to understanding many kinds of scientific questions: the course of evolution; the relationships between animals and plants (the ‘tree of life’); biogeography and biodiversity; how climate change has affected the biota. Human memories are short and inaccurate. Our shifting perceptions need to be tested against archives which are – as near as possible – permanent records of the fauna and flora.

  This concept of collections developed or evolved rather like those organisms kept in drawers or herbaria. There is evidence that humankind made collections from the earliest times, if claims about pierced snails and tusk shells from Africa are to be believed. These first collections were assuredly made for ornament, but humans evidently had a taxonomic eye from the outset, by picking out matching individuals belonging to a single species. Development of a ‘working taxonomy’ – distinguishing edible from poisonous plants, for example – is clearly of adaptive value. Collections made for cultural purposes accompanied early civilisations, and Adrienne Mayor has argued that fossil mammal collections made from the Cenozoic rocks of the Mediterranean region were displayed in Classical times as concrete evidence of the battles between races of giants and men: evidence of a kind, but mostly spectacle.

  The growth of scientific collections in a more modern sense frequently also had a comparable connection with display. The major figures in the early intellectual history of collections made what were essentially personal acquisitions, and a genuine love of scholarship happily mixed with a certain showmanship. They wanted to elicit admiration from their peers as well as understanding. John Evelyn (1620–1706) was both active in the Royal Society at its inception and was one of the outstanding virtuosi of his age; he corresponded with Boyle and Wren and other scientifically minded Fellows. It would be incorrect to categorise Evelyn as a scientist (after all, the term itself did not exist) though rationalist he assuredly was. His garden at Sayes Court, Deptford, was in a sense a research laboratory, a living catalogue of plants, and Evelyn was a pioneer in recognising what would now be regarded as the balanced diet and the importance of nutrition. He was justly proud of his garden and liked to show it off to his influential friends. But the idea of a living collection of plants was a natural extension from the medicinal gardens of the herbalists, and only a step away from the botanical gardens of today. The ‘system’ of specimen arrangement might change from one of curative ‘virtues’ to one of botanical classification, but on the ground that is only a matter of moving plants from one bed to another.

  As in so many other fields, Joseph Banks (1743–1820) contributed to the evolution of collections for scientific ends. When the young Banks embarked on the Endeavour under the captaincy of James Cook he was intellectually omnivorous, for all his official label as the expedition botanist. The expedition arrived in Tahiti on 13 April 1769 and stayed for three months. It is clear from the Endeavour Journal that Banks had a remarkably open attitude towards the manners and customs of the Tahitians; his observations cover the sexual mores, tattooing procedures, food and cooking, and organisational hierarchies of the native peoples, and are engagingly frank, without any sense of patronisation. The latter was to change, particularly in Victorian times, but Banks’ non-partisan approach speaks highly of the feisty aristocrat, and it was an attitude that he maintained despite several assaults that would have daunted a lesser man. One could also argue that his methods anticipated those of social anthropologists more than a century later. He even learned something of the language of the Tahitians, which is now regarded as the first thing any aspiring anthropologist must do.

  Banks’ ethnological and natural history collections were displayed to a wondering public at an apartment in New Burlington Street in 1772. They caused something of a sensation. In three rooms he exhibited different collections of the objects acquired on the famous voyage: militaria and sailing paraphernalia in one room; in a second, cooking utensils, dresses, jewellery and the like, together with 1,300 new species of plants; while a third room displayed a range of natural history specimens – reptiles, amphibians, birds, insects and many more, most new to science. The exhibition was more than just showmanship and display. It established the veracity of what Banks and his colleagues had seen on Cook’s voyage. The specimens became vouchers for the truth, and as such acquired permanent value. To be sure, his written observations of native peoples do constitute another kind of ‘collection’, but Banks was also assiduously developing the routines of making scientific and permanent collections of the natural world, in the company of his faithful friend, the botanist Daniel Solander. His Journal abundantly attests to a routine, and such steady behaviour always seems to characterise the scientist – as opposed to the poet, perhaps. Because of the perishable nature of living organisms it was also necessary to preserve the animal or plant in an image, and during the voyage Sydney Parkinson was on hand (until his untimely death*) to sketch and then colour the new finds with exquisite delicacy. Parkinson provided what has been termed a ‘virtual museum’ – a testimony to biological reality that could eventually be distributed among savants throughout Europe. Australia and New Zealand’s botanical wonders could be experienced on paper. The herbarium specimens were permanent, but pallid.

  Curiously, though, Banks never fully published Parkinson’s splendid drawings of the flora encountered on the Endeavour’s voyage. This is all the odder because Banks had spent £7,000 between 1771 and 1784 from his personal fortune to have copper plates of superb quality engraved from the watercolour drawings. Two centuries passed before the botanical engravings were finally published in their full glory; this happened between 1980 and 1990 as Banks’ Florilegium, produced in several parts to the highest standards by Alecto Historical Editions and the Natural History Museum. Banks eventually bequeathed both his plates and his specimens to what was then the British Museum, where they remain to this day. The reasons for Banks’ reluctance to publish are not clear; doubtless perfectionism was part of the problem. Then he was always busy with his duties as seemingly perpetual President of the Royal Society. The death of his friend Solander in 1782 did not help either – nor did the drop in share prices in the years leading up to the Napoleonic Wars.

  However, an interesting idea is suggested by Banks’ removal of the collections to a permanent house in his London address
in Soho Square. Here they were freely available to visiting scholars, including those from abroad. They became proper reference specimens, like the London Archaeopteryx with which this chapter began. Although not described in so many words, Banks had created a museum with pretensions for the public good. When he was taken on board the Endeavour the emphasis might have been on the discovery of commercially significant plants, or, in the words of the Council of the Royal Society ‘for the advancement of useful knowledge’. Although Banks had a good eye for business possibilities this was not the raison d’être of Soho Square, which was directed equally towards the scholar and naturalist. Maybe urgency of publication for Banks was diluted by the ready availability of his collections to those who desired to see the spoils of exploration, or make comparisons with some other plant to hand. The ‘virtual museum’ could wait.

  Banks also had a central role in the promulgation of living collections. He was closely involved with what eventually became the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, and by 1773 was de facto director. He planted eight hundred trees and shrubs originating from North America. In the Thames-side soil west of London ‘useful knowledge’ of plants could indeed be turned to potential gain. The fashion for hot houses full of exotics was in turn taken up by many members of the aristocracy – often for reasons of conspicuous display as much as botanical enthusiasm. The organised collection of living plants at Kew Gardens continues splendidly to this day, and the important role of these collections in conservation of rare species is something of which Banks would doubtless have approved. However, rather like Archaeopteryx, new scientific interrogations are constantly being made of the plant collections: molecular and genetic studies are currently most fashionable, but new areas of research will continue to open as science advances into the twenty-first century.

  Collections need to have a system for their arrangement; otherwise, how can an individual example be retrieved? The larger the collection, the greater is the problem of organisation. How should the plants be arranged as Kew expanded? The eighteenth century was a time when collections grew from a few cabinets to whole galleries, and gardens occupied many acres: retrieval of information became a logistical necessity. The publication of Systema Natur$$ by the Swede Carolus Linnaeus (Karl von Linné) in 1735 provided the key – for once in a rather literal sense.

  It has become a popular cliché to summarise Linnaeus’ achievement as providing the binomial name for organisms – the familiar form of Albus dumbledorus. It is certainly true that the provision of a unique name for a species did provide a labelling system that has proved indispensable for more than 250 years. Linnaeus’ methods have rubbed awkwardly up against twentieth-century phylogenetics – but that is another matter. From the point of view of collections what Linnaeus provided was a system – a hierarchy – that fed into practical arrangement. The higher levels of the Linnaean system – genera, families and so on – became an effective way of organising the mass of material that was being provided by 1770 from the fruits of global exploration: herbaria, museum galleries and gardens alike. Translation of Linnaeus’ works into English in the 1760s, together with popular accounts like William Withering’s Botanical Arrangement … &c of 1776, ensured that his ideas penetrated far into educated circles. Linnaeus’ contribution was far more than that little label stuck in the flower bed beside a strange herb – he was the intellectual designer of the garden as a whole.

  Linnaeus’ system was not without its conceptual antecedents. For example, no English writer should fail to acknowledge the contribution of John Ray (1627–1703) whose emphasis on morphology in plant classification in Historia Plantarum of 1686 anticipated Linnaeus in several respects. However, Linnaeus provided the impression of comprehensiveness, the authority that seemed to be able to embrace the whole of nature into a manageable hierarchy. Museum cases could now be labelled with the names of taxa that could be understood by all savants of the age in a similar way. As the Reverend Gilbert White wrote to his friend Daines Barrington FRS on 2 June 1778: ‘without system the field of nature would be a pathless wilderness’. Linnaeus provided both ‘system’ and a basis for systematics. His higher classification of flowering plants according to the sexual parts of the flowers has not survived unscathed, but probably no scientist other than Max Planck has had so many scientific institutions named for him. The Linnean Society of London holds many of his original papers and specimens. Linnaeus himself did not adequately characterise some of his plants in relation to a particular type specimen. This job has just been completed in 2007, with the publication of Order Out of Chaos by the Linnean Society. Once more those old herbarium specimens have been revisited, like so many floral Archaeopteryx, to live again in a new scientific context.

  Linnaeus was far from being an ‘ivory tower academic’. He knew how to put on a show. Perhaps the most spectacular example of his talent for display was a floral clock that he designed in Uppsala – a flower bed calibrated with species that opened hour by hour together at the appropriate time of day. He knew how to turn erudition into entertainment, and this did his patronage no harm at all. More seriously, his systematic plantings – his book written on to the earth, as it were – became a standard aid for teaching when imitated around the world. Bed after flower bed is typically planted with examples from particular families. This may sound a little mechanical, but in due season does have a certain aesthetic appeal, somewhat akin to listening to a theme and variations. There is a leisurely version of his systematic garden near the River Seine in the heart of Paris in the Jardin Botanique, and the University of Uppsala has maintained Linnaeus’ original. Of course, Kew Gardens has a fine example within its walls.

  Banks was a convinced Linnaean systematist, so the disposition of plants in Kew Gardens followed the appropriate arrangements. Even in the arboretum the system ruled by generally ensuring planting of species belonging to a single genus or family together in close proximity. Although most critics agree that Linnaeus himself believed in the fixity of species, it seems to me that the juxtaposition of sets of morphologically similar species is almost a precondition to setting a curious mind thinking about how one plant might relate to another (and the same will apply to a drawer full of congeneric butterflies or beetles). The origin of species is embodied in the arrangement of species. One observer might see discrete categories, created individually, another observer might start drawing in his mind ‘dotted lines’ between species of greater similarity. If a garden were planted out randomly, or according to some traditional system of medicinal virtue, such similarities – the fundamental ones – would scarcely be apparent. But collections systematically arranged became potential maps of relationships. Erasmus Darwin’s (1731–1802) famous assertion that animal life may have arisen from ‘one living filament’ (Zoonomia 1794–96) could be envisaged as a path, somewhat as in Gilbert White’s metaphor, connecting one organism to another in the garden of life.

  Gilbert White was under no illusion that ‘system’ was the whole story. In the same letter to Daines Barrington he objected to botany as being seen as something ‘that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge; and where the science is carried no further than a mere classification the charge is but too true’. This sounds a little like Ernest Rutherford’s famous fulminations against ‘stamp collectors’ (this being everyone except physicists). No, the interesting questions were what White termed ‘philosophical’ – which would broadly mean ‘testable hypotheses’ in present terminology. Prime among these would prove to be the mechanism for the generation of the diversity of all those species planted out in the systematic beds or gracing the hot houses of the wealthy, or shells and fossils in their ‘cabinets of curiosity’. At a time when international travel was expensive, arduous, and almost impossible to remote areas, collections provided the only access for many observers to a true picture of biological diversity.

  In a book concerned with giants, some of them unacknowledged, it would be wrong
to reinforce an impression that Linnaeus was a kind of lonely systematising hero, even if he himself might have fostered such a view. He did not cover the whole of biodiversity, although it sometimes seems as if his fellow countrymen conspired to do so. Erik Acharius (1757–1819) tackled lichens, for example, and Elias Fries (1794–1878) made astonishing advances with the fungi somewhat later, both aided in part by advances in microscopy. Nor was Linnaeus greatly concerned with fossils, the scientific understanding of which was advancing hugely in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as Martin Rudwick has described so well in Bursting the Limits of Time (2005). Georges (later Baron) Cuvier (1769–1832) developed comparative vertebrate anatomy in Paris, as did William Buckland in Oxford, while stratigraphic understanding advanced throughout Europe, most famously perhaps through William Smith’s (1815) geological map of Britain. Smith regarded his fossil collection as an essential validation of his map, a solid demonstration almost as important as the printed work. This reference collection now resides a floor or two above Archaeopteryx in London. All of these different systematic endeavours generated important collections. The permanent storage of reference specimens to found public museums is possibly the most important dowry in the marriage of science and collections.