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 twent
ieth 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.
Many private collections made by moneyed individuals eventually found their way into the national collections by bequest or donation. I might mention as one example the collection of Allan Octavian Hume from the Indian Empire acquired in 1885, with 63,000 bird skins, 19,000 eggs and, as an afterthought, 371 mammals. Or there is the famous Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) collection, comprising some hundred thousand specimens, left as a bequest by Edward Meyrick in 1938, the product of his lifetime’s learning and publication. Some collections were purchased; Hugh Cuming’s collection of shells was bought in 1866 for the appreciable sum at the time of £6,000, and a special grant was made from Parliament to buy it. It comprised 82,992 specimens. That is more than a dozen for a pound, which actually sounds quite reasonable. Overall, the collections grew apace, mostly filling up those cabinets behind the scenes, so that the general public would have been unaware of the increase. In terms of sheer numbers, the entomologists always win. According to William T. Stearn, the insect collections had grown from 2,250,000 specimens in 1912 to some 22,500,000 in 1980. For the whole Natural History Museum, the latest figure is eighty million specimens. Such a number is quite incomprehensible as a quantity. Who could say if a huge pile of wheat in front of them comprised a million, ten million or eighty million grains? We simply do not see large numbers that precisely. Perhaps the more meaningful image is that of the ranges of drawers I saw stretching away into the distance when I explored the far reaches of the Entomology Department all those years ago. There was a vision of the scale of life, shelves and shelves of it, stretching away apparently for ever. That is the extent of our responsibilities.
Making known the zoological treasures of Empire: the cover of Allan Octavian Hume’s journal Stray Feathers
One of the few things one can admire about the British Empire was its propensity to make museums and botanical gardens. A few years ago, I visited the Indian Museum in Calcutta, another huge and serious building in which the artefacts of the subcontinent were housed. The old Indian Geological Survey was nearby, and there were preserved trilobite specimens collected at the end of the nineteenth century, still in their original cardboard boxes. It was as if the whole place had been preserved perfectly since the British left, a kind of fossilized museum. The curation system still worked, although the twenty-first century had yet to impact on the organization. The same old typewriters were still at the deal desks as they had been in 1947. A clerk arrived at 10 a.m. every day and dusted them off with a feather duster, and then proceeded to do little visible work for the rest of the day. Flies buzzed in the sleepy heat of the afternoon. In the same city was a Botanical Garden, magnificent in decay. The old pavilions had literally gone to seed. Once formal flowerbeds were now overrun with native creepers. It was sad to see a system that had once worked so well fallen into desuetude. There were even snakes in the grass. The banyan tree had grown into the biggest in the world, or so it was claimed, with its many branches propped up by the columns of its aerial roots, so that this wholly natural structure looked like the great mosque of the Mesquite in Córdoba. I hope that when India becomes rich on its own account a little money will be spared to restore the Calcutta Botanical Garden. I had seen its well-cared-for equivalents in Christchurch, New Zealand (see colour plate 4), and in Sydney, Australia, both now grown to splendid maturity, and both worthy heirs to Kew Gardens in London. I like the thought of early colonists listing the creation of a botanical garden and museum as one of the earliest necessities, a badge of civilization. One could argue that this particular idea still has currency, even if many of the other colonial ideals have not withstood the scrutiny of history. It certainly indicates that the nineteenth-century administrators took plants and collections seriously. It is of a piece with the growth of museums and civic gardens in nearly every big town in the home country, and with the great exercise in the systematization of nature that prompted all those earnest contributions to the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, and its equivalents around the world. Nature must evidently be known and named, no less than its beauty appreciated.
Perhaps those colonial pioneers dreamed that the biological world would be described before the dawn of the twentieth century. If so, their dream went unfulfilled; that century came and went and still the inventory of nature was far from complete. I have mentioned already how the labour of making all the species known is still in progress in the twenty-first century. It will not be completed at the end of it, because of the sheer size of the task. We shall see below how modern molecular techniques might provide a shorthand way of speeding up identification. The problem now has an added urgency because of the changes, mostly destructive, that mankind is foisting on the environment. Who can predict whether whole ecosystems will be pushed to extinction as a result of global warming? There are so many species out there that have never been named and described, like those I mentioned in the deep sea. The Times reported on 27 June 2006 that an average of three new species of animals and/or plants had been discovered in Borneo for every month of the preceding decade—and this in a part of the world where forest has been reduced by 25 per cent since the mid-1980s. Every species on Earth has a biography, and each one is fascinating in its own way. There may be biologies in the deep sea about which we know nothing. Some of them may be useful to mankind in medicine, or in dealing with extreme conditions as we begin to stretch our metaphorical legs to climb to the stars. Who knows? If we allow species to disappear before they have a chance to tell us about themselves, it will be a tragedy to add to the many that our species has already inflicted on the world. The first stage towards understanding is naming—to recognize that this creature before us is different from another already known. I believe we do not have a moral right to imperil the continuation of any species. Who are we, one species among so many, to obliterate the work of millions of years of evolution? Are we like the Greek gods acting on whimsy? Unfortunately, it is difficult to persuade everybody of this moral position. It appears on few political manifestos, except as a kind of harmless truism, vaguely akin to “we must be kind to pretty furry things.” It is so much more important than that. I don’t want the only record of a species to be on a video archive, or one of those gloomy, pallid faces peering out of a jar in the spirit collections.
Now that it is clear that natural history museums have an increasingly important role in a world whose biodiversity is threatened, I should perhaps explain the nuts and bolts of naming animals and plants. Readers who are gardeners or ornithologists will be accustomed to calling their plants or birds by scientific names. These names provide a common language for all biologists around the world, because they are the official name, the agreed nomenclature. If the name Larus ridibundus is used by a Japanese, an American or even an inhabitant of the Philippines, it is the same bird species that is being identified, regardless of the local name; “black-headed gull” just happens to be our British local nam
e for this particular bird, but few Englishmen would know what the Japanese might call it. Different gull species would be just as precisely specified by their scientific names: Larus argentatus (our herring gull), Larus atricilla (laughing gull to an Australian) and so on. Plants can have many different vernacular names for the same species, even within the same country. In his magisterial Flora Britannica Richard Mabey tells us that Cow Parsley is known as Queen Anne’s lace, kex, kecksie, mummy die, grandpa’s pepper, badman’s oatmeal, blackman’s tobacco and rabbit meat. Anthriscus sylvestris may lack the charm of these local names, but it means the same to all interlocutors, regardless of their origin. The scientific name for a species has to be a unique two words, or binomial, so it differs from human names in this respect, where there is no limit to the number of John Smiths. The name has two parts: first, the genus (or generic) name, which is invariably capitalized; the second, the species (or specific) name, which is never capitalized even if it is obviously named after a person—as in johnsmithi. The latter is a convention, as is the italicization of the scientific name, which readily allows recognition of a scientific appellation in a sheet of printed text. When the same generic name appears in a list, it is customary to abbreviate it to the initial letter, as, for example, in remarking that a collection of birds’ eggs included examples of those of Larus ridibundus, L. atricilla and L. argentatus.
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