Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey

Author:Richard Fortey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307269409
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

One of the sheets from the herbarium of Linnaeus in the Linnean Society of London. This is larkspur, Delphinium consolidum.

The President of the Linnean Society would preside over a different body after 1858, even if the faces before him were the same as before. I should add that he would preside from what is almost certainly one of the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. It is made of crocodile hide, and I have watched successive Presidents wriggle uncomfortably about on it in the famous if incommodious lecture room, while portraits of Darwin and Wallace look sternly on. By contrast, the library upstairs is comfortable, bright and spacious, its two floors lined with books and attractively classically columned, giving on to an airy atrium with bays commanding a view of Piccadilly. There is much to entertain the natural history bibliophile on the crowded shelves. The library is just the place for colleagues to gather to discuss the evolution of daisies or the parasites of fishes over a glass of wine after the formal presentations downstairs. The President will mull over business with the Secretaries. Hobby-horses will be ridden, bees will buzz in bonnets. Brian Gardiner, formerly Professor of Zoology in London, might well be pressing the case for the relative neglect of A. R. Wallace compared with the near sanctification (in an agnostic kind of way) of C. Darwin. He has a point. A special fund was set up to rescue Wallace’s monument from overgrowth and collapse, whereas Darwin’s house and environs at Down are applying to become a World Heritage Site. Every aspect of the great man’s life has been the subject of biography, and usually several. Quite often somebody will be patiently explaining to someone else why their own particular organism is the best way to understand this evolutionary process or that.

The expert in the Natural History Museum on Solanum and its relatives is Dr. Sandra Knapp. She occupies another of the alcoves in the General Herbarium, one on the other side of the vault from Charlie Jarvis. It is difficult to describe Sandy as occupying any particular space, since she moves so frenetically around the Museum and seems to recruit all available spaces unto herself. She is one of a growing number of Americans on the staff in London—which is a measure of the increasingly international stance of the scientific research. She exemplifies the very best qualities of her nation—dynamic and enthusiastic, absolutely devoted to the cause of floras, good humoured, and completely without regard for the more ludicrous side of institutional life. Like me, she spends much time rooting around in piles of papers looking for something that has gone astray; unlike me, she usually finds it. Although now touched with grey, she is effectively ageless, so long as she can tap into the secret supply of energy to which she has exceptional access. The flowering plant family that includes the tomato is known as the Solanacea, and comprises about six thousand species belonging to about ninety genera: that is a lot to know about, pace the beetles.

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