Dry Storeroom No. 1 (6 page)

Most of the scientists behind the scenes are there because they are devoted to their organisms, like a good priest to his flock. At the present time, there are fewer scientists who exactly correspond to the specialist as I encountered him when I first walked around the Natural History Museum. As we shall see, there are many different kinds of systematic activities today. But it is still true that the taxonomic mission underlies the research programme. In this respect, a museum is different from a university department, where teaching and research run hand in hand, but research does not have to be related to collections. It is the collections that give a museum its signature, its durability, its ultimate purpose.

The Natural History Museum collections were moved from the mother institution in Bloomsbury; the transfer to the splendid new building was completed by August 1883. Richard Owen, he who had looked down upon me during my interview, was the driving force behind setting up an independent place to house natural history collections. He had previously been Superintendent of the Natural History Departments in the original British Museum, and argued that the collections had become too large for a billet among the antiquaries. Owen was a brilliant scientist and scholar, intensely ambitious, sometimes devious, a British pioneer in the study of comparative anatomy, and a guru of the bones. For example, he named the moa from its skeleton. The moa is an extinct flightless bird that walked around New Zealand until the arrival of mankind almost certainly extinguished the feathered giant; the scientific name was
Dinornis maximus. Ornis
is a bird in Greek, as in the word ornithology;
Dino-
= terrible as in “dinosaur,” “terrible lizard”
maximus
hardly requires explanation. His judgement rarely faltered when it came to appraising what a sample of bones meant in terms of its closest zoological neighbours. Yet he was no evolutionist. He opposed Darwin vigorously, even after the latter’s theory of evolution had won the day among the intellectual class in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Owen’s vision of a natural history museum was as a kind of paean to the Creator, a magnificent tribute to the glory of His works, a roll call of the splendid species created by His munificence and love for mankind. The words that I used to sing as a child put it thus: “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small / all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” The cathedral-like entrance to the great new museum, the nave-like main hall, those columns with their decking of leaves or biological swirls, they all had a message. Here was a temple to nature that was also a shrine to the Ancient of Days.

Owen was an establishment figure par excellence. He knew Prime Minister William Gladstone very well in the 1860s, and had even been a tutor in natural history for the royal children at Buckingham Palace. No museum figure of modern times has been so close to the seat of power. Owen knew how to make things happen, and his persistent lobbying eventually yielded dividends in the form of Alfred Waterhouse’s vivid new building. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, was sympathetic to housing natural history collections in his developing cultural “theme park” in Kensington, and opposite the industrial crafts of the “V& A” along Exhibition Road. The Prince’s effigy, covered in gold, still broods over the Albert Hall a few minutes’ walk north of the Museum on the edge of Kensington Gardens. Owen was trusted to design a museum with sufficient seriousness to satisfy the Victorian sense of self-improvement through knowledge, or as the Keeper of Mineralogy put it in 1880: “the awakening of an intelligent interest in the mind of the general visitor.” Owen certainly intended to display in the main hall what he called an “index museum” of the main designs of animals in nature, intended to be a kind of homage to the fecundity and orderliness of the Creator. However, by 1884, when the Museum formally appointed its first Director, William Flower, the principle of evolutionary descent seemed to be the only acceptable way to organize nature for explanatory purposes. The cathedral had been hijacked for secular ends, and the temple of nature had become a celebration of the power of natural rather than supernatural creativity.

Richard Owen in old age with the skeleton he helped to reconstruct of the extinct New Zealand moa, the world’s largest bird

There are large marble statues of both Charles Darwin and his famous public champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, on display in the Natural History Museum. There is also a bronze of Richard Owen. Few visitors seem to notice them, or pause to read their plaques. Darwin and Huxley look out over a refreshment area on the ground floor, so the great men contemplate a clutter of tables rather than the grandeur of nature. A seated Darwin is in the splendour of his old age, every inch the bearded patriarch; Huxley, seated nearby, is brooding and imperious. Richard Owen stands around the corner, in academic dress, halfway up the main flight of stairs facing the main entrance. His hands are slightly outstretched, and at least to my eye there is something clerical about him, as if he were offering a blessing rather than a specimen, although his face is still fierce and commanding. The formality and equality of white stone have somehow ironed out the differences between Darwin and Huxley; it is their enquiring spirit that pervades the Museum. They have become the saints in the place. Oddly, the dark bronze of Owen seems more out of place, as if its metallic heaviness were symbolic of the arguments lost to the presiding genius of Darwin, beatified in marble.

It is curious to reflect that the differences that separated these two men, the bronze and the marble, still count today, well over a century later. London is dotted with memorials to its great scientists. Newton is in the Royal Society; Michael Faraday stands outside the Institute of Electrical Engineers on the Embankment. Yet nobody challenges the insights that Faraday or Newton had into the workings of the world (while recognizing, of course, that understanding has also moved on). Yet there are those who would still side with Owen, against Darwin and Huxley, on the subject of biological evolution—they would seek to reverse their respective historical roles and, no doubt, cast out the marble statues. This view is predicated on the idea that evolution is “just a theory” and that other theories—which in fact mean only “creation science” or its close relative “intelligent design”—deserve an equal airing. There are some important and interesting matters hidden away in this argument. There are, indeed, some theoretical issues in evolutionary theory that are still being investigated; indeed, there are whole journals devoted to such questions. Furthermore, this is what science is about—probing questions, not just giving “the answer.” Physics and chemistry are no different in this regard—they are full of theories in the process of being tested. So are cosmology and economics. But the crux for the statue of Darwin is a third consideration. The issue of “creation science” is not the kind of theoretical question about kin selection that might be found in a scientific journal, it’s about whether evolution happened
at all.
Put bluntly, it is about whether or not we share a common ancestor with a chimpanzee. The descent of all life through evolutionary processes is not a “theory” in the sense that the creationists would have us believe. So overwhelming is the evidence for evolution by descent that one could say that it is as secure as the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun and not the other way. Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world. So those who promulgate “creation science” are trying to pull off a trick of intellectual legerdemain, a mind jump concealed by jiggery-pokery, mixing in the truly theoretical with what most scientists would simply refer to as the fact of descent. The effect is to try to turn the clock back to a time when immutable versus mutable species was actually a serious debate, a period when Owen and Darwin might have been thought evenly matched for a while. Like Prince Albert, Owen might have finished up gold-plated and Darwin relegated to a back room somewhere in Dry Storeroom No. 1 if only the facts had turned out differently. History has been kinder to Owen than might have been the case. He is recognized as one of the leading anatomists, an outstanding scientific organizer and instigator of a great museum, even if his dreams for it were transmuted.

The marble statue of Charles Darwin, in wise old age

The hidden rationale behind the displays in any natural history museum I can call to mind is evolutionary, at least as a kind of organizing principle. It does not have to be like that. I can easily imagine an interesting museum in which organisms were arranged by size or colour, or by their utility to mankind. Storage of all the specimens behind the scenes is an entirely different matter, for that has to be systematic. I understand that there is a now a Creation Museum in Kentucky. Its own creators doubtless regard it as a “balance” to all those pesky “evolutionary” museums. It is interesting that the embodiment of respectability for an idea is still a museum, as if a Museum of Falsehoods were a theoretical impossibility. I look forward to a Museum of the Flat Earth, as a counterbalance to all those oblate spheroid enthusiasts.

The Natural History Museum is just one of many in the United Kingdom, and its story could be matched in almost any European country or in North America. The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world. Museums grew up everywhere, as a kind of symbol of seriousness. Universities founded their own reference collections, some of which grew and prospered. Cambridge University has a collection for almost every science department, and Oxford University acquired one of the most beautiful museums of natural history in the world. In some ways, it is a small version of the London museum, but lighter and airier inside, less cathedral, more marketplace. Large towns needed a museum to celebrate their prosperity, and this period of unrivalled industrial growth meant that there were many new fortunes that sought relief in the purchase of collections. Gentlemen needed “cabinets.” An interest in natural history was almost as respectable as an interest in slaughtering wild animals. Our mammal collections show that the two interests were far from incompatible, and that an African or Indian “shoot” could easily become a collection. Scotland was redoubtable in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an intellectual centre, so it is no surprise to find that the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow and the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh both have wonderful collections. Wealthy individuals began to realize that a certain kind of immortality could be ensured by endowing collections in their name, and that this was a rather more tangible result than the prospects in the afterlife. One thinks of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. The upshot of all this was an explosion in the number of museums paralleling the growth in the numbers of Literary and Philosophical Societies. Nor was this activity confined to the middle classes, as Jonathan Rose has explained in his
Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
No, there was general enthusiasm in most social classes for the life of the mind and the excitement of the new exhibit.

And in the case of Britain this enthusiasm was coupled with the expansion of the Empire. The rights and wrongs have been debated, but it cannot be questioned that the British thought they had both a right and a duty to collect, and then collect some more when abroad in the Empire; and then to send the contents of their collections back home—for keeps. In the eighteenth century, the prospect was for plants of “utility and virtue,” as Sir Joseph Banks had said. The market potential was very explicitly built into the purpose of collections. Banks’ collections made on the Captain Cook voyage in
Endeavour
between 1768 and 1771 were one of the glorious foundation stones on which the Natural History Museum was built. But in the nineteenth century there was an increasing awareness that the study of plants and animals had a value in itself, that indeed there was a
duty
to inventory the glories and variety of the Empire’s realms; this was an impulse carried forward into the twentieth century, at least until the liberation of the “colonies.” Many of the collectors were amateurs in the best sense—intelligent men and women posted to India or Australia, or another of Britain’s many dominions, with time enough to make collections. This was no doubt motivated in some expatriates by the need to alleviate the boredom of duties carried out far from home; others may have made natural history collecting part of a wider programme of exploration. Terrestrial snails were sent to the Natural History Museum by the splendidly named Henry Haversham Godwin-Austen from India, where, among other things, he surveyed the world’s second highest mountain, K2, or Mount Godwin-Austen. Many collectors were talented artists, and women, in particular, were often trained in the skills of watercolour painting. Colours in life could be accurately recorded, even if the collecting process dimmed the original. Then, too, the postal system of the Empire was very efficient, so that collectors could receive encouragement and requests for more specimens from the appropriate Keeper or curator at a museum. From some parts of the world, such as Burma, it was easier to communicate then than it is now.