The natural history museum has about 70 million collections, covering all aspects of life. Every corner of the planet adds about 654.38 million pieces of collection every year. However, in fact, only when you see something that is not on display will you know that it is really a treasure house. In big cabinets and small cabinets, long rooms with rows of shelves, thousands of animal specimens are soaked in bottles, millions of insects are nailed in square cardboard books, and drawers are full of shiny mollusks, dinosaur bones, early human skulls, and countless plants flattened by clips. You seem to be roaming Darwin's brain. The storeroom alone has more than 20 kilometers long shelves with canned animals preserved with methylated alcohol.
Here are joseph banks's specimens collected in Australia, alexander von humboldt's specimens collected in the Amazon River basin, Darwin's specimens collected during the voyage of Beagle-there are many other specimens, which are not very rare, or have great historical significance, or both. Many people will like to reach out and touch, and some people really will. From 65438 to 0954, the museum obtained a batch of excellent bird specimens from an enthusiastic collector named Richard Meinertzhagen. Meinertzhagen is the author of Birds in Arabian Peninsula, and has written many other academic works. For many years, he has been a loyal visitor to the museum. In order to write his own books and monographs, he takes notes almost every day. When the box arrived, the managers quickly pried it open to see what was inside. To put it mildly, they were surprised to find that a large number of specimens were labeled with the museum's own label. It turns out that Meinertzhagen has been collecting specimens for them for many years. This explains why he has the habit of wearing a coat, even in warm summer.
A few years later, a lovely old customer of the mollusk department-I was told that he was "still an outstanding gentleman"-was found red-handed when he stuffed priceless shells into the hollow legs of his Zimmer walker.
"I think there are always people drooling over the things here." Richard ford said thoughtfully as he showed me around the enclosed part of the museum. As we strolled through department after department, we saw people sitting at big tables, studying arthropods, palm leaves and boxes of yellow bones. There are people everywhere who are leisurely engaged in a grand cause, which will never end, so there is no need to rush. 1967, the museum published a report on the John Murray expedition, which was an expedition to the Indian Ocean, 44 years after the end of the expedition. In that world, people do things at their own speed, including Fu Tai and the small elevator I took. There is an old man who looks like a scholar in the elevator. The elevator went up slowly at the speed of sediment falling, and Futai and the old man chatted affectionately.
After the man left, Futai said to me, "He is a lovely guy named Norman. He has been studying a plant called Hypericum for 42 years." 1989 retired, but still came every week. "
"How can it take 42 years to study a plant?" I asked.
"Isn't it incredible?" Futai agreed. He thought for a moment. "He obviously studied it thoroughly." The elevator door opened and a brick exit appeared in front of him. Futai looks a little overwhelmed. "It's strange," he said. "This used to be the Department of Plants." He pressed the button and went up a storey. We climbed the back stairs and carefully passed through several other departments, only to find that the researchers were tirelessly studying the objects that once had life and finally found the way to the plant department. So, I was introduced to Ryan Ellis and The Quiet World of Moss.
Emerson said poetically that moss likes to grow on the north side of trees ("In the dark, the moss on the trunk is the Big Dipper"), but he actually meant lichen, because lichen and lichen were inseparable in the19th century. Real moss is not picky about where it grows, so it can't be used as a natural compass. Actually, there's nothing Moss can do. "Perhaps there is no large class of plants as useless as moss, whether commercially or economically," Henry S Conrad wrote. This is said in the book How to Distinguish Moss from Leaf Moss, which has a sad taste. This book was published by 1956, and it is still on the shelves of many libraries. This is almost the only work that tries to popularize this theme.
However, moss is a very fertile plant. Even if lichen is not counted, moss is still a prosperous kingdom, with about 700 genera and more than 654.38+0 million species. A.J.E Smith's thick book Bryophytes in Britain and Ireland is 700 pages long, but Britain and Ireland are by no means places where moss stands out. "You won't know how much moss there is until you get to the tropics." Ryan Ellis said to me. He is a man of few words. He has worked in the Museum of Natural History for 27 years and has been the director of this department since 1990. "For example, if you go to the rain forest in Malaysia, you can easily find new species. I have been there myself not long ago. I looked down and saw a species that had never been recorded. "
"So, we don't know how many species have not been discovered?"
"Oh, yes. Everyone has no concept. "
You may think that not many people in the world are willing to spend their whole lives studying that humble thing, but in fact there are hundreds of people who study moss, and they have strong feelings for their subjects. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "meetings are usually still very active."
I asked him to give a controversial example.
"Oh, here is one, which was picked up by one of your compatriots." He smiled and opened a thick reference book with several illustrations of moss. To the layman, the most striking feature of these mosses is that they all look very similar. "Well," he said, pointing to a kind of moss, "they were originally a genus, Fusarium. Now it has been reclassified into three genera: Fusarium, Warnstorfia and Hamatacoulis. "
"Is that why everyone started fighting?" I asked, perhaps with a glimmer of hope.
"Oh, that's reasonable. That makes sense. However, it means spending a lot of time rearranging the collection, and those books were once out of date, so everyone complained a little, you know. "
He told me that moss also has many mysteries. There is a famous example-it is very famous for people who study moss anyway-there is a solitary moss called Stanford Wetland Moss, which was found on the campus of Stanford University in California. Later, it was found to grow on a roadside in Cornwall Peninsula, England, but it was never encountered anywhere in the middle. How it can exist in two places far apart is a mystery. "Now, it is called Stanford Bromus," Ellis said. "It has been revised again."
We nodded thoughtfully.
If a new moss is found, it should be compared with all other mosses to see if there is any record. Then, you should write down the correct description, prepare illustrations and publish the results in a decent magazine. For bryophyte taxonomy, the 20th century was not a harvest time. A lot of work in this century has been spent on cleaning up the chaotic and repetitive stalls left over from the19th century.
It was a golden age of collecting moss. You may remember that Lyell Charles's father was a great man who studied moss. ) There was an Englishman named George Hunt who tirelessly searched for British moss. He probably played a role in the extinction of several kinds of moss. However, due to such efforts, Ryan Ellis's collection has become one of the most complete collections in the world. He has a total of 70,000 to 80,000 specimens, which are pressed in a big and thick paper book. Some of them are very old. Victorian people wrote instructions on it like spider silk. As far as we know, some of them may be robert brown's handwriting. Brown was a great botanist in Victorian era, who had revealed Brownian motion and nucleus. He established the botany department of the museum and presided over the department in the first 3 1 year until his death in 1858. All the specimens are kept in shiny old mahogany cabinets. These cabinets are beautiful, so I made some suggestions.
"Oh, that's Sir joseph banks's thing. This is his home in Soho Square. " Ellis said casually, as if he were appraising the furniture he had just bought from IKEA. "He made these cabinets to store the specimens collected from the voyage of Endeavour." He looked at the cabinets thoughtfully, as if he had seen them for the first time in a long time. "I don't know how we deal with them in the field of bryology," he went on.
This sentence contains rich historical content. Joseph banks is the greatest botanist in Britain, and the voyage of Endeavour-that is, the voyage in which Captain Cook drew the map of transit of venus in 1769 and declared Australia a royal colony-is the greatest plant exploration in history. Banks paid 654.38 million pounds, equivalent to 600,000 pounds today, and let himself and nine other people-65,438+0 naturalists, 65,438+0 secretaries, 3 artists and 4 servants-join this three-year adventure around the world. God knows how Captain Cook, who has a rough personality, gets along with these elegant and spoiled people, but he seems to like Banks very much and can't help but admire his talent in botany-the younger generation feels the same way.
No plant expedition has made such great achievements, not in the past and not in the future. This is partly because this voyage colonized many unknown new places-Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and New Guinea-but mainly because Banks is a keen and talented collector. Even though he could not land in Rio de Janeiro due to quarantine regulations, he secretly got a pack of feed for the animals on board and made new discoveries. Nothing seems to escape his eyes. He brought back a total of 30,000 plant specimens, including 1400 plants that have never been seen before-which can increase the total number of known plants in the world by about a quarter.
However, in an era of almost absurd thirst for knowledge, the huge gains of banks are only part of the total gains. In the18th century, collecting plants became an international craze. Honor and wealth are waiting for those who can discover new species. Botanists and adventurers try their best to satisfy the world's thirst for novel plants, which has reached an incredible level. Thomas nuttall named wisteria after kasper wistar. When he came to the United States, he was an uneducated printer, but he found himself interested in plants. He traveled halfway across the United States and collected hundreds of plants he had never seen before. Frey fir was named after John Fraser. He spent several years collecting specimens for Catherine the Great in the wilderness and finally found that Russia had a new czar. The new czar thought Fraser was crazy and refused to fulfill his contract. Fraser took everything back to Chelsea, where he set up a nursery and sold colonial azaleas, Mulan, Parthenocissus tricuspidata, Zi Yuan and other exotic flowers and plants to the English squires, which made them very happy and he made a lot of money himself.
As long as you make the right discovery, you can make a lot of money. John Leon, an amateur botanist, spent two years collecting specimens, and got a reward equivalent to125,000 pounds today. However, many people who do this kind of thing are completely out of love for botany. Nuttall donated most of the specimens he found to the Liverpool Botanical Garden. Finally, he became the director of Harvard Botanical Garden and the author of Flora, an encyclopedia of North America (this book was not only written by him, but also largely typeset by him).
This is just a part of the plant. And all the animals in the New World-kangaroos, kiwis, raccoons, red cats, mosquitoes, and other unimaginable strange things. The number of life on the earth seems endless, as jonathan swift pointed out in a famous poem:
So the naturalist noticed a flea,
Prey on smaller fleas;
Smaller fleas will bite smaller fleas.
Who knows where the end is
All this new information needs to be archived, sorted out and compared with the known information. The world urgently needs a feasible classification system. Fortunately, some people in Sweden are ready to stop.
His name is Karl Linnaeus (later renamed as the more aristocratic von Linnaeus with permission), but now people only remember his Latin name Carolus Linnaeus. He was born in Rashul village in southern Sweden, and his father was a poor and ambitious Lutheran assistant priest. He was lazy in his studies, so his father was very angry and annoyed and sent him (according to some accounts, almost sent him) to the shoemaker as an apprentice. Xiao Lin shuddered at the thought of driving nails into leather all his life and begged for another chance. His demands were met. Since then, he has always insisted on making academic achievements. He studied medicine in Sweden and Holland, although he gradually became interested in nature. /kloc-in the 1930s of 0/8, he used his own system to compile the world catalogue of animal and plant species. His fame gradually rose.
Few people feel as comfortable with their fame as he does. He spent a lot of spare time painting and beautifying his portraits, claiming that he never became a "greater botanist or zoologist" and his classification system was "the greatest achievement in the field of science". He also modestly suggested that his tombstone should be written with the epitaph of "Plant Prince". It is definitely not a wise thing to question his self-evaluation of praise. People who do this often find their names used to name weeds.
Another distinctive feature of Linnaeus is his persistent-and sometimes fanatical-interest in sex appeal. He was particularly impressed by the similarity between some bivalves and female vulva. He named some parts of the clam vulva, labia, pubic hair, anus and hymen. He classified plants according to their reproductive organs and described them as being able to love like people. When he describes flowers and their behaviors, he often mentions promiscuity, infertile mistresses and newly-married beds. In the spring, he wrote in a frequently quoted sentence:
Love even comes from plants. Men and women ... hold weddings ... and show who is a man and who is a woman through the sex organs. With the leaves of flowers as the wedding bed, the creator has made excellent arrangements, hanging such elegant bed curtains and sprinkling all kinds of elegant perfumes, so that the bride and groom can celebrate the wedding more grandly here. Once the bed is ready, the groom should hug the bride and entrust himself to her.
He named a plant clitoris (that is, butterfly bean). It is not surprising that many people think he is eccentric. However, his classification system is very attractive. Before Linnaeus, the names of plants were indescribably heavy and inseparable. Because of the different names, the plant world is in chaos. A botanist wondered whether Rosasylvestrisalbatunrubore and folioglabro were referring to the same plant that other botanists called Rosasylvestrisinodoraseucanina. Linnaeus simply called it Rosacanina (a rose with thorns), thus solving this problem. This greatly shortens the names of plants and makes them useful and acceptable to everyone. This requires not only decisiveness, but also an instinct-in fact, a genius who can discover the remarkable characteristics of a species.
The position of Linnaeus classification system has been firmly established, and it is hard to imagine any other system to replace it. Before Linnaeus, the classification system was extremely arbitrary. The classification criteria of animals can be: wild or domestic, terrestrial or aquatic, big or small, and even they are considered beautiful, noble or insignificant. Buffon classified animals according to the size of their use to people, with little consideration for anatomical characteristics. Linnaeus classified them according to their physiological characteristics, and took correcting the above shortcomings as his lifelong career. Taxonomy-that is, the science of classification-never went back.
Of course, all this takes time. The first edition of his masterpiece Natural System 1735 is only 14 pages. However, it is getting longer and longer, and by the time 12 edition-the last edition that Linnai saw alive-it has been expanded to 3 volumes, with a length of 2,300 pages. Finally, he named or recorded about 13000 kinds of plants and animals. Other works cover a wider range-john ray's General History of Plants, a three-volume English book written a generation ago, and there are no fewer than 65,438+08,625 kinds of plants alone-but Linnai has something unparalleled: coherence, order, conciseness and timeliness. Although his works were published as early as 1930s, it was not until 1960s that Linnaeus became famous in Britain and became the original figure in the eyes of British naturalists. No other place has adopted his system so enthusiastically (which is one of the reasons why Linnaeus Association is located in London instead of Stockholm).
Linnaeus is not perfect. His works collect descriptions of monsters and "freaks", credulous sailors and other imaginative travelers. One of them is a savage who walks on all fours and has not mastered the art of language. He is "a man with a tail". However, we should not forget that it was a very gullible period. /kloc-At the end of 0/8, it was said that a mermaid was seen on the Scottish coast, and even the great joseph banks was very interested in it. However, on the whole, Linnaeus's mistakes were offset by his sound and often wise classification method. He also made many other achievements. Among them, he believes that whales belong to the order of quadruped mammals (later renamed mammals) together with ordinary terrestrial animals such as cattle and rats. This is unprecedented.
At first, Linnaeus intended to use a common name and a number to record each plant, such as Inula 1, Inula 2 and so on. However, it was soon found that this method was not satisfactory, so I came up with a method of classification by duplicate names. Until today, binomial classification is still the core of this system. He intends to apply binomial system to everything in nature, such as rocks, minerals, diseases, wind and so on. However, not everyone enthusiastically agrees with this system. Many people feel uneasy that this system is often vulgar. This is a bit ironic, because before Linnaeus, the common names of many animals and plants were also very low. Dandelion is considered to have diuretic effect, so it has long been called "urinal". Other common names are mare's fart, naked girl, twitching testicles, hound's urine, naked ass and toilet towel. One or two of these vulgar names may still be left in English by accident. For example, the "girl hair" in the girl hair moss (that is, iron moss) does not refer to the hair on the girl's head. In short, people have long felt that some names in natural science should be renamed in the traditional way to make them more serious. Therefore, when they found that the self-styled vegetable prince inserted clitoris, sexual intercourse, vulva and other names in his works from time to time, everyone was a little unhappy.
In the following years, many of these names were gradually abandoned (though not all: common Fritillaria is still called Coprinus in formal occasions), and many other elegant names were introduced to meet the increasingly specialized needs of natural science. In particular, the system gradually adopted some rank names as the basic framework. Naturalists have used genera and species for many years before Linnaeus 100. 18 began to use the biological meanings of "order", "class" and "family" in 1950s and 1960s. "Gate" was founded in 1876 (German haeckel); Until the beginning of the 20th century, "family" and "purpose" were considered interchangeable. Where botanists use the word "eye", zoologists used to use the word "family", which sometimes almost confused everyone.
Linnaeus once divided the animal kingdom into six categories: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects and worms, and everything that could not be classified into the first five categories was classified into the sixth category. From the beginning, it was obvious that it was not satisfactory to put both lobster and shrimp in worms, so many new species were created, such as mollusks and crustaceans. Unfortunately, this new classification is not uniformly used in all countries. In order to unify the pace again, the British promulgated a new set of rules called strickland's Law in 1842, but the French thought it was overbearing, so the Zoological Society immediately countered and put forward its own contradictory laws. At the same time, the American ornithological society decided to use the 1758 version of "natural system" instead of the 1766 version used elsewhere as the basis for all naming, for unknown reasons. This means that in the19th century, many American birds were classified into different genera from their European brothers. Until 1902, at a meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, naturalists finally began to show the spirit of compromise and adopted the law of unity.
Taxonomy is sometimes described as a science and sometimes as an art, but it is actually a battlefield. Even today, this system is more chaotic than many people think. Take the division of the door describing the basic cross section of biology as an example. There are several familiar phylum, such as mollusks (including clams and snails), arthropods (including insects and beetles), chordates (including us and all animals with spines or primitive spines). Moreover, the situation soon became more and more blurred. In the obscure door, we can list Gastrognathia (marine worm), Spinocera (jellyfish, hydra jellyfish and coral) and Sawthorn (or penis worm). Familiar or not, these are the basic categories. Surprisingly, however, people have different views on how many doors there are or how many doors there should be. Many biologists insist that the total number is about 30, but some people think that about 20 is more appropriate. The number put forward by Edward O. Wilson in the book Diversity of Life is as high as 89. It depends on where you classify-that is, biologists say, depending on whether you are a "taxonomist" or a "taxonomist".
On a more general level, species are more likely to have different names. Whether a goatskin should be called Aegilopsincurva, Aegilopsincurvata or Aegilopsovata may not be a big problem, and it will not arouse the enthusiasm of many non-botanists, but it can cause a very heated debate among relevant people. The problem is that there are 5000 kinds of grass in the world, and many of them even look like people who know grass. As a result, several species have been discovered and named at least 20 times, and it seems that almost no grass has not been independently discovered at least twice. The two-volume "American Cao Zhi" used 200 pages to clean up all synonyms, which are repeated names that botanists often use casually. That only involves the grass of one country.
In order to solve the global differences, an organization called the International Association of Plant Taxonomy ruled on the issues of sequence and repetition. It gives orders from time to time, announcing that from now on, California upside-down golden bell (an ordinary rockery garden plant) will be called willow leaves; Shrub grass can now be regarded as the same species of woven willow grass instead of pseudo-woven willow grass. Under normal circumstances, these are all minor problems that will not attract much attention. However, if they sometimes offend people's beloved garden plants, it will inevitably cause angry screams. In the late 1980 s, the common chrysanthemum (according to the seemingly reasonable principle) was expelled from the genus of the same name and returned to the less interesting genus Mangosteen.
Chrysanthemums belong to a group of people with strong self-esteem and a large number of people. They protested to the Seed Plants Committee. This committee sounds awkward, but it actually exists. (Others include the Committee on Pteridophytes, the Committee on Bryophytes and the Committee on Fungi, all of which are responsible for the implementation of the so-called "General Rapporteur"; Such an institution is really worth cherishing. Although some naming rules should be strictly observed, botanists are not indifferent to emotions and withdrew that decision in 1995. Due to similar circumstances, Petunia, Euonymus Eupatorium and a common Eupatorium odoratum did not suffer the fate of degradation. However, many kinds of geranium plants are not among them. A few years ago, in protest, these plants were moved to geranium. These arguments are all described in Charles Eliot's potted shed literature.
The same quarrel, the same reclassification, has happened in all other biological fields, so it is not as easy as you think to get a total. Therefore, we don't know anything about how many creatures there are on the earth-in Edward O. Wilson's words, "we don't even know the nearest approximate number". This is a very surprising fact. It is estimated that this figure is between 3 million and 200 million. Even more incredible, according to a report in The Economist, as many as 97% of the world's plant and animal species have not been discovered.
Among the known organisms, more than 99 of the 65,438+000 species have only one simple description-"a scientific name, several samples in museums, and sporadic descriptions in scientific magazines." Wilson described our state of knowledge like this. In the book Diversity of Life, he estimated that the known species-plants, insects, microorganisms, algae and everything-were 654.38+0.4 million, but went on to say that this was just a guess. Other authorities believe that the number of known species is a little more, ranging from1.50,000 to1.80,000, but there is no centralized record of these things, and the figures cannot be found. In a word, we don't really know what we know. This is our incredible state at present.
In principle, we can go to experts in various professional fields and ask them how many species there are in their fields, and then add them up to get a total. Many people actually do the same. The problem is that the sum of any two rarely matches. Some have 70,000 known fungi, while others have 65,438+million species-a difference of nearly 50%. You can find a confident assertion that 4000 kinds of earthworms have been described, and you can also find an equally confident assertion that there are 12000 kinds. As far as insects are concerned, the number ranges from 750 thousand to 950 thousand. You know, these are all by speculating on the number of known species. As for plants, the recognized number is between 248,000 and 265,000. This error does not seem to be very big, but it is more than 20 times the number of flowering plants in North America.
It's not easy to put things in order. In the early 1960s, Colin groves of Australian National University began to systematically study more than 250 known primates. It turns out that the same animal is often described more than twice-sometimes seven times. The discoverer doesn't know that the animal he is studying has long been known to the scientific community. It took groves 40 years to sort all this out. It is still a relatively small animal group, and it is easy to distinguish and generally uncontroversial. If someone tries to do similar work on about 20,000 kinds of clothes, more than 50,000 kinds of mollusks or more than 400,000 kinds of beetles on this planet, God knows what will happen.
One thing is certain, there is a lot of life in the world, although the actual number can only be estimated by inference-sometimes rambling inference. In the 1980s, in a famous experiment, Terry Owen of the Smithsonian Institution sprayed pesticides on the 19 tree in the rain forest of Panama, and then picked up everything that fell from the tree and put it in his net. Among his catches (actually, several catches, because he repeats experiments seasonally to ensure that migratory species are caught), there are 1200 species of beetles. According to the distribution of beetles in other places, the number of other tree species in the forest, the number of forests in the world, the number of other insects and other variables, he estimated the whole.