Dry Storeroom No. 1 (34 page)

Experimental decomposition of a piglet by flies (
above
) and, below, the chief agent of rapid consumption of flesh, the bluebottle
Calliphora vicina
(with larvae)

But then, butterflies and moths are also the insects that inspire the acquisitive collector’s obsession. Small flies and aphids are strictly for the dedicated scientist. There are collectors who simply
have
to own a specimen of some beautiful, rare or famous species of Lepidoptera. A desperate satisfaction is to be had from being the owner, the one who gloats over possession in the secrecy of a private study, the hoarder. John Fowles’ first novel,
The Collector
(1963), delineates the character exactly, the “hero” of the novel graduating from capturing butterflies to kidnapping a beautiful girl. Fowles gives his collector the name of Clegg; I don’t believe that it is a coincidence that cleg is the country name for an altogether unattractive insect—the persistent horsefly that will not leave you alone until it has tapped into your blood. That most fastidious stylist among novelists, Vladimir Nabokov, had a parallel life as a lepidopterist. His speciality was the blue butterflies, a group that manages to be both complex to understand and delicately beautiful, so I suppose that is entirely appropriate. Near where I live small blue butterflies flutter like so many animated harebells on the chalky downs: they don’t want to be pinned down. Nabokov published extensively on these butterflies, and I estimate that his readership for such scientific papers might be one-thousandth that of the novels. But the famous writer regarded his entomology as almost as important as his fiction, which provides an encouraging change from those who measure distinction by the yardstick of fame alone. The genus
Nabokovia
is named for him.

Those who work professionally with butterflies soon lose the desire to own their own collection. If one can look through endless drawers of perfectly pinned specimens whenever one wishes, ownership of them quickly begins to seems irrelevant. I lost my desire to own trilobites when I could look at the national collections as often as I wanted. However, there have been butterfly collectors who have not been above pillaging the ranks of Museum specimens for their own secret stashes. Dick Vane-Wright told me about Colin Wyatt, a well-known collector in the 1940s. He was quite famous as a mountaineer and adventurer, and made a good living as a circuit lecturer. He appeared regularly in the Museum to study Apollo butterflies, as a respected visitor, arriving with his briefcase holding sandwiches and notebooks. Eventually, an observant curator realized that specimens seemed to have been disappearing after his visits, and a covert watch was kept. It transpired that he had installed a false bottom in his case: he was a real kleptomaniac. The bottom of the case could be lifted out, and hidden beneath it there was a cavity lined with cork into which butterflies could be pinned. Dozens of specimens could be secreted away in this fashion, the work of a few seconds. He was successfully prosecuted in the end—but only after he had changed the labels on hundreds of specimens to favour himself.

In writing about the hidden Museum it is tempting to concentrate on the “parasites” and the “butterflies,” those people and case histories that induce a shudder or a smile. I should make more of the unsung heroes of the Entomology Department: those who labour away for their whole lifetimes to elucidate a chunk of the insect world. Because there are just so many insect species, these labours are bound to be Herculean. The qualities needed for such a systematist are preternatural persistence, tireless organization, a prodigious memory, an eye for detail, a capacity to draw, a talent for writing clearly, a will for finishing things and an ability to snarl at intruders. The ability to discourage unwanted distractions is vital to the completion of the Great Work; those lesser souls who always like to chew the fat and put off completing that scientific paper until the day after tomorrow will never quite get there. If genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains, as famously defined by Thomas Carlyle, then these people are truly geniuses—and possibly saints at the same time, a most unusual combination in my experience. Barry Bolton spent his working life on ants until he retired. A smallish man with white hair and a staccato manner, he reminded me of William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who. His devotion to ants excluded every diversion, and all Museum management exercises were ignored or repelled, sometimes with an ungracious expletive. Ants demand microscope work, hours of it, and skills in dissection, and a capacity to remember all those other ants. The end result of all that labour is the completion of the most comprehensive systematic treatment of ants in a series of massive publications. Barry considered every known ant genus in his 1995 book
A New General Catalogue of the Ants of the World
(all 504 pages of it). One of the greatest of all living evolutionary biologists, E. O. Wilson of Harvard University—also a specialist on ants—confessed to being slightly in awe of Barry Bolton. As this is written, a new and even more comprehensive work dealing with all 14,550 species and subspecies of ants is being advertised:
Bolton’s Catalogue of Ants of the World.
Other authors are involved with this work, but it seems that Barry has now achieved the immortality of Gray, of
Gray’s Anatomy.
Anatomy
is
Gray, just as ants
are
Bolton.

One of Bolton’s predecessors, Peter Mattingly, was one of the leading researchers of his time on mosquitoes. Such was his fame in the early 1980s that when a visitor arrived from Africa to see Dr. Mattingly—only to find that he was on leave—he still requested to be shown into his office. There he spent several minutes in silence gazing at the empty chair normally occupied by the guru. He just wanted to absorb the ineffable vibrations. But within the Natural History Museum Mattingly was famous for being the most absent-minded of all scientific staff, and this in a profession where absent-mindedness is regarded as part of the job description. He was quite bent over, particularly at the top of his back—not I believe because of any congenital deformity, but as a consequence of many years peering down a microscope. The condition is known as “microscopist’s hump.” So when he walked about the place it was with his head leading the way, glasses perched somewhere near the tip of his nose. When he left work in the evening he took off down the front steps of the Museum at a terrific lick and marched straight across the Cromwell Road, briefcase dangling from one hand. The Cromwell Road is one of the busiest thoroughfares in London, so how Mattingly managed to escape being run over was a mystery. Possibly thinking about mosquitoes all the time protected him, or maybe he actually had an insect-like sensitivity to approaching hazards and possessed the speed of reaction of a housefly. Mattingly collected his keys every day from the key pound. On one occasion in July he arrived in the usual way and wordlessly scooped up his keys, moving head-first towards his office. A few minutes later a woman ran in, breathless. “Has Dr. Mattingly arrived?” she gasped. When the answer was given in the affirmative, she explained that she was Mrs. Mattingly and that all the family had been waiting in the car to go on summer holiday…but before he could be stopped Dr. Mattingly had grabbed his briefcase and shot off to the commuter train and come into London to work on his mosquitoes. He had forgotten all about the holiday. One of his entomological contemporaries told me of a time when the lavatory arrangements in the department were renovated, the upshot being that the Gents’ toilet was replaced by a Ladies’ on a nearby site. After several months, Mattingly happened to remark that they had rather mysteriously removed the urinals from the Gents’ lavatories, and why would that be?

One or two people have toppled over into clinical madness. Peter Lawrence worked on the tiniest of insects, the springtails (Order Collembola). These wingless little creatures are often assumed to be the most primitive living members of the Class Insecta, and they certainly have a fossil history going back to the Devonian, about four hundred million years ago. If damp vegetation by a pond is turned over with the fingers, the chances are that some jumping little flecks will be disturbed, and that these will be springtails: they have a little “spring” on their body that helps them to jump. With around ten thousand known species, springtails provide plenty to occupy a working life, and Peter Lawrence knows a great deal about these little animals. He became obsessed with the idea that they were crustaceans rather than insects. He also suffered from what is now known as bipolar disorder. In the Museum, the condition had an opportunity to develop unchecked to more and more impossible extremes, while Peter was tucked away in his cubicle, until in the 1980s he was finally hospitalized. This might seem like a tragedy, but Peter would probably disagree. He is an extraordinarily creative person. In 1989 he published an account of famous “manics,”
Impressive Depressives,
showing how such people during their “highs” achieved exceptional things—he would probably like the condition to be considered as much a gift as a curse. I received extraordinary letters from him during the 1990s. He sent wonderful, crazy collages—a mixture of drawings and cut-outs from magazines and written messages. I think they may have been works of art. I learned recently from Edmund Launert that Peter Lawrence amassed a collection of thirty thousand picture postcards, probably the largest of its kind in Britain—he supplied three-quarters of the images for an exhibition of such memorabilia at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The fact that he always wore clothes picked up from jumble sales, or that he collected pigeon dung from the towers of Gormenghast to supply his houseplants, seems rather unimportant compared with his idiosyncratic achievements. And since recent molecular work has shown that the crustaceans are closer to the insects than was thought twenty years ago, maybe the springtails still have new and interesting things to reveal about their ancestry.

An example of the tiny, primitive wingless insect the springtail, much enlarged

There is no question that the Natural History Museum did attract oddballs, some of whose conditions were less identifiable than that of Peter Lawrence. One or two were rich enough to require no financial support, and presented specimens, so the Museum became a kind of asylum for them where a life could be spent painlessly away from the real world. The Baron de Worms sounds like he should have been the authority on annelids, but he was an aristocratic entomologist of private means who was a perpetual presence in the Entomology Department in the middle of the twentieth century. He wore thick pebble glasses and a suit like a banker and was shaped very much like Humpty Dumpty in the famous Tenniel drawing from
Alice Through the Looking Glass.
He sported a dark moustache, and had very black hair that never went grey. I am told that he was frequently to be found waiting outside the Ladies’ lavatory, but I have been unable to establish exactly to what purpose. He attended all the meetings at the Royal Entomological Society, whose premises lay opposite the Museum at its western end, at 41 Queens Gate. Despite the fact that in those days the seats were very uncomfortable wooden pews, the Baron seemed to be able to fall asleep during the lectures, and punctuated the proceedings with loud grunts. If he liked the lecture, the grunts were different ones than if he disapproved. He was a famous glutton. A member of staff called Graham Howarth once asked him to dinner, and he established that he must come early and leave quickly. After consuming a three-course dinner, on his way out he asked his host if there were any decent restaurants in the vicinity as he was feeling a little peckish. And at one Entomology Department Christmas party some young wags put those expanded polystyrene flakes that are used in packing into one of the snack bowls—the Baron de Worms got halfway through a bowl before he realized anything was amiss.

Every so often, albeit rarely, major changes in ideas about insect ancestry do happen. Paul Eggleton demolished an order of insects in 2007. Termites are the voracious wood consumers of the tropics; they are also social insects unrelated to Barry Bolton’s ants, but every bit as sophisticated. They have distinctive castes within each species designed to do different tasks, and all governed by hormones released from a gigantic, motionless queen lodged deep in the nest, who might lay thirty thousand eggs with no trouble at all. There are something like three thousand species of termites, of which just a few are injurious to mankind. Those that do harm us are serious pests: in the southern United States, termite damage is alleged to cost more than flood and fire damage put together. Their red tower-like mounds in the outback of Australia are among the most wonderful constructions in nature—orientated precisely to maximize the sun’s beneficial effects, and “air conditioned” internally so as to maintain a temperature of 29.5 degrees centigrade. It has been one of my life’s unfulfilled ambitions to eat the giant mushroom
Termitomyces
that grows deep inside the termite mounds in Africa—it is reputed to be delicious. For all my working life I have been accustomed to referring to the termites as belonging to the Order Isoptera—meaning “same wings,” a nod to the similarity of their fore and hind wings. Paul’s latest work based on sequence analyses of five genes spanning a number of termite genera and a series of cockroaches proves that the termites are classified with one particular kind of wood-eating cockroach—or “woodroach,”
Cryptocercus.
Termites are thus likely to be highly evolved cockroaches—or, to put it another way, these hitherto separate groups of insects share a common ancestor.