Dry Storeroom No. 1 (48 page)

There is no question that the gene option has helped to revitalize taxonomy. It would be tragic if it also had the undesirable effect of killing off experts on the “whole organism,” by what is euphemistically known as collateral damage. I have watched the number of paid professionals on my own trilobite corner of natural history go down to a quarter in Britain during my working life, and no sign of new jobs for the younger generation. My last three research students have gone on to earn a decent wage in the City. Trilobites are not exceptional. For most of my life I have been an amateur mycologist, and I have watched the few paid experts who can identify mushrooms in fields and woods get older, retire and not be replaced. This is despite the fact that there are still many new fungi to discover. The same is true of professionals who know about less fashionable kinds of insects. There are just so few grants to help the process along. The one beneficial effect of this apparently inexorable change in scientific demographic is that people who know their organisms can continue working usefully into old age. I met the aphid expert Victor Eastop shortly after joining the Natural History Museum; now in his eighties, he is still globe-trotting to identify species of these tiny and troublesome plant suckers. He is a small and neatly bearded man with a prominent nose—quite suitable for smelling out the smallest differences between species. He tells me he has trouble remembering people’s names these days, but is still on top of the greenflies. In 2007 the great biologist E. O. Wilson inaugurated a project to collate systematic efforts over the internet, under the title
Encyclopedia of Life.
The project overview states: “Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the the internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every species.” It is an ambitious idea, and one that fits in well with the suggestions made in this book. If it works, maybe we will be just in time to know what there is in the world, before global climate change and population growth put a majority of species under threat. This project is almost as urgent as it is necessary. Museums will be an important part of it.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the Natural History Museum was a part of the British Museum at Bloomsbury, the head of the whole organization was called the Principal Librarian; even the Keeper of Zoology started with the title of Under-Librarian. The collection of books has always been central to the systematic enterprise. The number of books and journals collected by the Museum has grown inordinately: five thousand volumes left the care of Bloomsbury for South Kensington in 1881; there were 750,000 volumes by 1980; they may have doubled again since then. I have explained how the traditional way of determining a species entails comparing a study specimen with a mass of published illustrations and descriptions: the piles of books and papers soon become impressive, and tidiness becomes impossible. The libraries in the Museum are thus working collections as much as those held in the endless ranks of drawers behind the scenes. The libraries are also a repository for treasures. The originals of famous wildlife illustrations are held there, so it is partly an art gallery; rare books are hidden away in secure storage, so another part of the library is a bibliophile’s Mecca. The rarest works of natural history are now hugely valuable. That incomparably perfect ornithological masterpiece, John James Audubon’s
Birds of America,
published between 1826 and 1838, seldom comes on the market, but when it does it commands vast prices—a set sold for $7 milllion. The Museum once threatened to sell a copy when it experienced a financial crisis. It is surprising how threats of selling off a masterpiece get more publicity than the plight of the beetle collection.

I have mentioned a few of the
florilegia
that combine great artistry with botanical accuracy. The Museum is richly endowed with the drawings of the Bauer brothers, Franz Andreas and Ferdinand Lucas. One could argue indefinitely over which of the two produced the finer illustrations of flowers, or whether both should doff their hats to Georg Dionysius Ehret, who painted the plants that Sir Joseph Banks brought back from Newfoundland and Labrador in the eighteenth century. Despite, or perhaps because of, the perfection of these artists, I find the work of the artist on Captain Cook’s first voyage, Sydney Parkinson, particularly affecting. Poor Parkinson died in 1771 before he was thirty, towards the end of the voyage, but not before completing 280 plant paintings and about 900 sketches and drawings. The pencil sketches he made—for example, one of the earliest portraits of the kangaroo—have a delicacy about them that lifts them above mere illustration. The artistic worth of the Natural History Museum’s holdings of Sydney Parkinson is perhaps only now being appreciated. Even in the Palaeontology Library the Rare Books Room is lined with brown leather-bound tomes of every shape and size. Here can be found the famous book by George Scrope describing the volcanoes of the Auvergne, alongside a hundred other volumes that have now been largely forgotten. Nor are the books merely of antiquarian interest: an academic visitor from the Czech Republic found a trilobite specimen buried in the collections which turned out to be one of the first ever illustrated from the ancient rocks of Bohemia—and we were able to check the specimen against the figure because a rare and early work by Born was carefully preserved in the library. The rule
never throw anything away
was vindicated yet again. So the library has a collection that includes items more like those in an art or an antiquarian gallery: intrinsically valuable, they are part of a national heritage regardless of their scientific importance. There is an obligation to care for these books and illustrations in perpetuity, so the future of this part of the collection is not in doubt. Treasures need guardians.

The rest of the library comprises more recent books and long runs of journals. The
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
is the Methuselah of them all, having been published since 1665. More and more journals have joined it over the years as the pressure to “publish or perish” has built up, and companies like Elsevier have surfed a wave of academic anxiety to a landfall of profits. It has now become extremely difficult to be up to date, as dozens of ever more specialized journals compete for one’s attention. Since the pressure to be first in the field is also increasing, it seems probable that more and more publication will happen initially online. Paper copies can follow on at a leisurely pace, because priority will have been established. Already, most authors send their papers as computer files to their colleagues, who may print them out only if they wish to. It is a profound change in culture. Will libraries continue to be the permanent archive in a virtual world? Will journals in the old sense survive at all? Even the venerable Royal Society has “fast track” journals that appear first online, and then eventually in print. In theory, the contents of an entire library should be accessible over the web—even down to old Scrope himself. It just requires time and money to scan the classic works. I suppose that my attachment to the look of the printed page is hopelessly old-fashioned, as is feeling a curious connection with those who went before me when I take an old volume off the shelf. It might well happen that visitors to the lines of shelves with their runs of journals bound in matching livery will get fewer and fewer as internet access improves. If this happens one might wonder whether the next generation might lose contact with history itself, riding always on a few months’ virtual journals, a gathering amnesia erasing the past as intellectual obsolescence creeps inexorably towards what was published the day before yesterday.

One wants to be as positive as one can be about the obvious and accumulating changes in the culture of natural history in national museums. If the difficulties with finding permanent employment for alpha taxonomists are combined with the revolution in library and information access made possible by the web, one comes up with an oddly satisfactory solution. The day of the botanizing vicar will return. The amateur will enjoy a renaissance. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many of the most distinguished names were amateurs, only in the sense that they did not earn a living from working on fungi or fossils. Parsons and moneyed bourgeoisie—Gilbert White or Charles Darwin, say—were typical of this caste. At that time it was possible to hold the relevant literature on a particular group of organisms within a typical middle-class study. Much later, my inspiration, Mr. Morley Jones, still had books on diatoms in his own collection sufficient for him to make a worthwhile contribution to the subject. Today, armed with the unlimited resources of the internet, anyone talented and determined enough may carve out a place for himself as an expert on a favoured group of organisms. All the literature and photographs, keys and microscopic details can be made freely available. If the early phase of systematic learning was mostly powered by privilege, the middle phase by support from government for professionals, maybe the third phase will be immensely democratic, and driven by the freedom of information exchange thrown up by the web.

“Kangaru.” Probably the first European drawing of a kangaroo, by Sydney Parkinson, made during Captain Cook’s first voyage (1768–71)

It is already happening: I have met dedicated people in the mycological world who have devoted years to “their” genus of mushroom. I have met devoted and unsalaried bee men and beetle women. The role of the museum will continue to be to house material, and particularly types, but this material will be derived from a different and more inclusive demographic. While the paid professionals move further into molecular work, where the amateur cannot follow, the “hairs on legs” of little-known species will increasingly be studied by a new breed of websavvy naturalists in contact with all their fellow enthusiasts around the world. Authority will be devolved to a thousand computer terminals. The reign of the solitary and mighty figure below stairs in the Museum may well be coming to an end in the age of
The Encylopedia of Life.
But it will be more important than ever that the professional expert should still retain his or her place as guardian of the collections and as “quality control” on the taxonomy produced by the wider community. There is a division in taxonomy that is nearly as old as the subject itself between “lumpers” and “splitters.” The former take a wide view of a species, while the latter tend to recognize more and finely differentiated entities, which are then given separate names.
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With regard to birds this may not seem too much of a problem—though there are fierce controversies even here—but with organisms like fungi and molluscs there are unending debates about what makes a species. In actively evolving plants that can also hybridize, the problems are compounded; people have gone prematurely grey trying to wrestle with the complexities of the brambles (
Rubus
). Since evolution is still happening all around us, it would actually be rather surprising if there were
not
such difficulties of definition in nature.

To some, it might seem rather tempting to propose a new species in order to achieve a certain kind of immortality—but it could well be a species that will not stand up to subsequent scrutiny. Many pretty colour forms of mushrooms and shells have been shown to be variants rather than real species. There
has
to be a sound system of refereeing lest “new” species pop up indiscriminately and lead eventually to a riot of unnecessary names. The continued existence of the expert will be absolutely essential to make sure that Linnaeus’ original intention of making a system of nature does not founder in a welter of nomenclatural chaos, a return to the Dark Ages of disorder. The professional systematist will be there to adjudicate between new methods of identification carried out by his fellow scientists and data gathered by a growing army of unpaid experts. It is profoundly to be hoped that scientists in Third World countries will participate in this taxonomic democracy. There need to be more of them to come to care as much about their own fauna and flora as has become commonplace in western countries; if so, there may yet be hope for the future of global biodiversity. The end of all this is to open humankind’s eyes and hearts to the joy of our world’s biological richness, from microbe to mastodon, from
Selaginella
to
Sequoia.
The means is continued discovery, unravelling the Tree of Life, and describing the fascinating biographies of a million organisms. Every species on Earth has its story to tell. But the first stage will always be the naming of names.

It should be clear from what I have written that I have affection for those people who have worked away unseen behind the public galleries: the secret museum. Without being too fanciful, I might say I have lined them up in my own gallery, curated them by displaying their peculiarities and made of them my own idiosyncratic museum. I could write another book as long as this with a completely different cast that is every bit as extraordinary. A number of my colleagues winked at me when they heard what I was about and hinted that this might be a time to settle old scores. I soon discovered that the real business was to explain what museum science is about, and to try to understand how the taxonomic sciences have evolved since the early days. So I have described a selection of the research that is going on right now. It does not pretend to be a comprehensive account—it’s not even representative. It is just my own collection—projects that caught my eye, or seemed to show where science might go, or were chosen just because I admire the people doing them. It is my own Dry Storeroom No. 1.