their uncanny similarity one to another. “That,” he said, tapping a moss, “used to be one genus,
“And did that lead to blows?” I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.
“Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling.”
Mosses offer mysteries as well, he told me. One famous case-famous to moss people anyway-involved a retiring type called
We nodded thoughtfully.
When a new moss is found it must be compared with all other mosses to make sure that it hasn’t been recorded already. Then a formal description must be written and illustrations prepared and the result published in a respectable journal. The whole process seldom takes less than six months. The twentieth century was not a great age for moss taxonomy. Much of the century’s work was devoted to untangling the confusions and duplications left behind by the nineteenth century.
That was the golden age of moss collecting. (You may recall that Charles Lyell’s father was a great moss man.) One aptly named Englishman, George Hunt, hunted British mosses so assiduously that he probably contributed to the extinction of several species. But it is thanks to such efforts that Len Ellis’s collection is one of the world’s most comprehensive. All 780,000 of his specimens are pressed into large folded sheets of heavy paper, some very old and covered with spidery Victorian script. Some, for all we knew, might have been in the hand of Robert Brown, the great Victorian botanist, unveiler of Brownian motion and the nucleus of cells, who founded and ran the museum’s botany department for its first thirty-one years until his death in 1858. All the specimens are kept in lustrous old mahogany cabinets so strikingly fine that I remarked upon them.
“Oh, those were Sir Joseph Banks’s, from his house in Soho Square,” Ellis said casually, as if identifying a recent purchase from Ikea. “He had them built to hold his specimens from the
This was an amazing disclosure. Joseph Banks was England’s greatest botanist, and the
Never before or since has a botanical party enjoyed greater triumphs. Partly it was because the voyage took in so many new or little-known places-Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea-but mostly it was because Banks was such an astute and inventive collector. Even when unable to go ashore at Rio de Janeiro because of a quarantine, he sifted through a bale of fodder sent for the ship’s livestock and made new discoveries. Nothing, it seems, escaped his notice. Altogether he brought back thirty thousand plant specimens, including fourteen hundred not seen before-enough to increase by about a quarter the number of known plants in the world.
But Banks’s grand cache was only part of the total haul in what was an almost absurdly acquisitive age. Plant collecting in the eighteenth century became a kind of international mania. Glory and wealth alike awaited those who could find new species, and botanists and adventurers went to the most incredible lengths to satisfy the world’s craving for horticultural novelty. Thomas Nuttall, the man who named the wisteria after Caspar Wistar, came to America as an uneducated printer but discovered a passion for plants and walked halfway across the country and back again, collecting hundreds of growing things never seen before. John Fraser, for whom is named the Fraser fir, spent years in the wilderness collecting on behalf of Catherine the Great and emerged at length to find that Russia had a new czar who thought he was mad and refused to honor his contract. Fraser took everything to Chelsea, where he opened a nursery and made a handsome living selling rhododendrons, azaleas, magnolias, Virginia creepers, asters, and other colonial exotica to a delighted English gentry.
Huge sums could be made with the right finds. John Lyon, an amateur botanist, spent two hard and dangerous years collecting specimens, but cleared almost $200,000 in today’s money for his efforts. Many, however, just did it for the love of botany. Nuttall gave most of what he found to the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Eventually he became director of Harvard’s Botanic Garden and author of the encyclopedic
And that was just plants. There was also all the fauna of the new worlds-kangaroos, kiwis, raccoons, bobcats, mosquitoes, and other curious forms beyond imagining. The volume of life on Earth was seemingly infinite, as Jonathan Swift noted in some famous lines:
All this new information needed to be filed, ordered, and compared with what was known. The world was desperate for a workable system of classification. Fortunately there was a man in Sweden who stood ready to provide it.
His name was Carl Linne (later changed, with permission, to the more aristocratic
Rarely has a man been more comfortable with his own greatness. He spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never “been a greater botanist or zoologist,” and that his system of classification was “the greatest achievement in the realm of science.” Modestly he suggested that his gravestone should bear the inscription
Linnaeus’s other striking quality was an abiding-at times, one might say, a feverish-preoccupation with sex. He was particularly struck by the similarity between certain bivalves and the female pudenda. To the parts of one species of clam he gave the names v