Dry Storeroom No. 1 (30 page)

Floras go back to the early days of botany, although as we have seen they were originally accounts of the plants of famous gardens as much as of regions.
Flora Mesoamericana
breaks new ground in exploiting the internet to make it available to those who wish to use it in the field. There is a special online version provided with multiple indices so that the confused botanist can soon find a source of illustration for the species before him, and the correct name for it. On a more modest scale, field guides to the plants of particular botanical “hot spots” are useful to many amateur devotees of rare and interesting flowers. Islands in particular have endemic species, many delightful, and some in need of protection. Sandy’s colleague Bob Press has compiled a flora of Madeira, for example, which helps the field botanist with recognition of that island’s many special plants. In my view these are as important a contribution as specialized floras, all the more so because they broadcast our expertise so widely. My field guides to the British flora are the most dog-eared of all my books, and if wear is proportionate to affection, they must also be the most loved.

With the spread of internet storage and access for natural history information, there is an important issue about what constitutes publication, and even whether we need conventional books at all. There is no question that the web is an extraordinary resource for botanists, zoologists, entomologists and palaeontologists. If information can be freely posted on the web, the question needs to be asked whether it is necessary to buy a book at great expense that merely repeats the same information in printed form. Do trees have to be sacrificed for nothing? Identification does not require fat manuals. Botanists in particular love keys: dichotomizing keys. These have a very long tradition in botany and mycology, and I rather like them myself. For example, if you know the genus of the plant before you and want to determine the species, you need a key to that genus; it might begin: flowers blue
or
flowers red—your first choice. Once you have decided that the flower in front of you is red, you then go to the next series of choices, which might be: leaves entire
or
leaves divided. Leaves entire—good! Next choice: stem smooth
or
stem hairy—undoubtedly the latter. By now, you might have arrived at a species name—the one with red flowers, entire leaves and hairy stems—say
Rubrifloria hairystemmia
(to make one up). We could have finished up with a species with blue flowers, divided leaves and smooth stems—say
Coeruliflora glabristemma
(to make up another one). The dichotomizing key really is quite simple—in theory. However, if the species in question belongs to a genus like
Solanum
with more than a thousand species, negotiating one’s way through a key can become quite tricky. It is very easy to take a wrong turn somewhere and finish up with the wrong name. It’s rather like missing a vital turning off a trunk road and finishing up at Peebles, or in a DIY superstore. But with a little practice a key is a great asset—and it is ideally suited to placing on the web.

There are already dozens, if not hundreds, of such keys available there. I find this development entirely positive. It takes the scientist out of his turreted redoubt in one of the remote corners of Gormenghast and places him or her at the disposal of all interested parties around the world. It passes on expertise acquired through hours of burrowing through obscure tomes so that anyone can use it. This is a kind of democracy of learning, a generous gift from the cognoscenti to those who wish to learn. But it does not invalidate the field guide or the monograph. It will still be a pleasure to take a pocket book into the flower-laden roadsides and hills in Madeira for consultation. You
could
take a computer, and summon up the data stored in the great virtual mind, but—if one is honest—it is easier to take out a pocket book from the anorak and leaf through a friendly field guide. Or, for the definitive illustration of a plant, surely the old skills of the botanical artist still have a place. I would hate to think that the sublime artistry of a latter-day Ehret could be outflanked by an efficient digital camera. I hope that this is not mere sentimentality or artistic snobbery on my part. Nobody could dispute that colour photography of wildlife has improved enormously—good photography has become an everyday achievement. But this quotidian competence cannot be a substitute for the exquisite productions of a botanical artist, where the essence of the plant is distilled into a plate with all the assurance of a Van Dyck nailing character into the span of a canvas. Let us celebrate both the advances in technology that make identification of organisms a common right, and the esoteric skills and experience of specialists that deserve to live on.

Where the web will have the greatest impact is in making available technical information and illustrations to experts and amateurs around the world interested in particular animals or plants. This applies across the Natural History Museum, and not just to botany. You could imagine a field botanist in base camp in the jungles of Indonesia having a hunch about the identity of a particular plant—and instantly conjuring up the type material on his computer to make a comparison there and then. This is one way to turn a national museum into a truly global resource, and, thanks to their long history of exotic collections, one with particular use in the developing world. My palaeontological colleague Andrew Smith is compiling a catalogue available on the web of all the genera of sea urchins (echinoids), including, naturally, many known only from fossils. There are beautiful photographs of museum specimens from several views, descriptive notes and accounts of geological occurrence. The numerous “hits” on the site from all around the world testify to the usefulness of such an online resource. The arachnologists—spider people—have a web-based guide to European species, while Norman Platnick from the American Museum of Natural History is compiling a global catalogue of more recent spider literature. The list of useful guides, catalogues and keys on the web is getting longer every day. Type almost any scientific name into Google and an image will be recruited from somewhere or other. What these images do
not
necessarily have is the imprimatur of somebody who really knows their stuff, because there is little quality control on the identifications placed on the web. Some of the identifications could well be wrong, and thus do more harm than good. The role of the expert will more and more be to validate such websites. Of course, even experts get it wrong from time to time, but an advantage of the web is that corrections and corrigenda do not have to wait for a paper publication.

However, most scientists would agree that for a “science of record” like systematics it is still desirable to have paper copies stored safely away on library shelves. There are good practical reasons for this, which go beyond just an undeniable feeling of permanence. The trouble with computers is that they deal best with one or two images at a time. When the systematist is plying his or her trade the office tends to get into a state that might be kindly described as creative chaos. This used to irritate a former Keeper of mine, famous for his orderliness, who would declaim “untidy desk, untidy mind” whenever he visited my office. I never had the courage to reply “empty desk, empty…” What he was referring to was piles of books, many of them open at illustrations of trilobite specimens. When we make visual comparisons, we do not do it one image at a time; the human eye and mind are adept at making multiple comparisons, at weighing up similarities and differences. So if there is an unidentified fossil or plant to hand, scanning by eye around maybe ten publications (one or two strewn on the floor) is quite the best way to make comparisons. A good systematist is often described as having a good “eye” for a character—which means recognizing the significant features and filtering out the rest. The heap of books is not likely to go away soon, unless economic factors force “real” publication into extinction.

There is something about being a botanist that encourages sex. It would be fanciful to suggest that this harks back to Linnaeus (yet again) for his success in classifying plants according to the sexual system—his naming and numbering of the parts of the flower, stamens, stigmas, styles, ovaries and so on. Early objectors to the Linnaean system thought that looking at plants in this fashion might encourage lasciviousness, or else that the system was not proper for the eyes of ladies to contemplate. This does seem strangely consistent with some of the more arcane parts of the Kinsey Report in which a small percentage of the population were reportedly aroused by chrysanthemums. However, the exclusive use of floral parts in classification has long since fallen away. The whole plant is used, leaves, roots and all. On the other hand, the tactile qualities of tendrils and climbers come to mind. The Keeper of Botany in my early days at the Natural History Museum was Robert Ross, who was known universally by the female staff as “octopus Ross.” I mentioned earlier the small lift to the left of the main entrance that takes staff and visitors up to the Herbarium, and the Keeper’s office which was then on the same floor. Women were warned never to go into the lift with Ross, or they would risk an attack of the tendrils. It was regarded as a kind of occupational hazard of working in the Botany Department. The women concerned seem to regard the memory of their encounters with amused resignation. Jenny Bryant recalls going into the lift with Ross while he was holding two large books in each hand; she still doesn’t know how the wandering hand appeared between the first and second floors. For his part, “octopus Ross” never bore a grudge when his advances got nowhere—it seems he rather expected it, but had a go anyway. He was always immaculately besuited when I saw him, a short man and well groomed, the very image of a perfect gent. Of course, his behaviour would never be tolerated today. For some reason, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that his favourite pastime was morris dancing.

If Robert Ross’ predilection was a common one, the story of Herbert Wernham was a little odder. He was a curator in the Botany Department. In the 1910s he wrote on the suitably named madder family, Rubiacea. Edmund Launert told me that Wernham was always broke. He frequently took his wages in cash. He was soon relieved of his earnings by two women who appeared every Friday on the dot at the back of the Museum. Even so, he always had something at the pawnbrokers. But the most extraordinary part of his story was that after he died a card index was found which contained a series of neat entries filed in alphabetical order. On each card was the name of one of his sexual conquests accompanied by a neatly pinned sprig of pubic hair. They might have been so many delicately coloured ferns. It seems that the instincts of the systematist were so deeply ingrained that he must perforce make an archive, duly arranged. Once a curator, always a curator.

Robert Ross was an expert on diatoms. Even in old age he could be consulted on matters of their nomenclatural minutiae. Diatoms are minute single-celled plants that are ubiquitous in freshwater and marine environments. They are one of the most important components of the marine phytoplankton—and thus form much of the basis of the whole marine food chain. They are also very important bottom-dwelling organisms in lakes and waterways. Charles Darwin would have called them infusoria, which always reminds me of a tisane more than an organism. In his account of the journey of the
Beagle
(1839), he recorded the natives of Tierra del Fuego using a diatom-rich “earth” as face paint. The species were identified by that early hero of the microscope, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg of Berlin, author of the mighty
Mikrogeologie
of 1854. Diatoms have exquisite skeletons formed of the mineral silica—silicon dioxide—that are composed of two valves that fit together like an old-fashioned pillbox. They are fretted and sculpted like the most delicately worked Islamic filigree.

Nature’s most exquisite constructions: diatoms from Christian Ehrenberg’s
Mikrogeologie
(1854)

I have a particular connection with diatoms that goes back to my early childhood in Ealing, the “queen of the suburbs” of London, where I grew up. My mother had a childhood friend, Catherine Morley Jones, whose parents lived in what would now be regarded as a rather grand Victorian house in Ealing. As a nine-year-old I was once taken to visit the Morley Joneses, and I recall a curiously old-fashioned household with ticking grandfather clocks and much dark-brown furniture. Mr. Morley Jones was a tall, distant and erudite figure. Everyone was in awe of him, and he was referred to as “father,” as if he were a priest. But he treated children as if they were grown-ups, which was a novelty to me, and not unwelcome. He took me into his study and allowed me to look down a microscope for the first time in my life. He studied diatoms, and I remember the sense of amazement at the microscopic beauty that could be revealed just by using a strange piece of brass-and-glass equipment. It was no less of a surprise to learn that there was so much hidden in the world and that almost everything in the landscape was
alive.
It could have been the moment that determined much of my future. Mr. Morley Jones was indeed a serious amateur student of the diatoms. He mounted his specimens—the little silica cases rather than the living diatoms—on microscope slides labelled with his own tidy hand. Half a lifetime later I checked with the then expert on diatoms in the Natural History Museum, Barrie Paddock, and sure enough there was an entry for a substantial Morley Jones collection, donated to the Museum for the use of future students
pro bonum publicum.
Some of them must have been those same slides that I had looked at when I was still in short trousers, and which made me change my mind about being an engine driver. I experienced a curious frisson when I saw the old slides.