A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [177]
“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 But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling.”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 Hyophila stanfordensis, which was discovered on the campus of Stanford University in California and later also found growing beside a path in Cornwall, on the southwest tip of England, but has never been encountered anywhere in between. How it came to exist in two such unconnected locations is anybody's guess. “It's now known as Hennediella stanfordensis,” Ellis said. “Another revision.”
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 Endeavour voyage.” He regarded the cabinets thoughtfully, as if for the first time in a long while. “I don't know how we ended up with them in bryology,” he added.
This was an amazing disclosure. Joseph Banks was England's greatest botanist, and the Endeavour voyage—that is the one on which Captain Cook charted the 1769 transit of Venus and claimed Australia for the crown, among rather a lot else—was the greatest botanical expedition in history. Banks paid £10,000, about $1 million in today's money, to bring himself and a party of nine others—a naturalist, a secretary, three artists, and four servants—on the three-year adventure around the world. Goodness knows what the bluff Captain Cook made of such a velvety and pampered assemblage, but he seems to have liked Banks well enough and could not but admire his talents in botany—a feeling shared by posterity.
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.