ural ory Museum in London, built into recesses along t corridors or standiricuryor so of otive clutter, are secret doors—at least secret in t t to attract tor’s notice. Occasionally you migracted manner and iingly en doo disappear ttlefurt tively rare event. For t part tay s, giving no t beyond ts anotural ory Museum as vast as, and inmany he publiows and adores.

        tural ory Museum tains some seventy million objects from every realm oflife and every er of t, o tion eac it is really only be you get a sense of reasure s and long rooms full of close-packed s tens of ttles, millions of is pio squaresof card, dras. It is a little like room alone een miles of saining jar upon jar of animals preserved ied spirit.

        Back ed by Josepralia, Alexander von in Amazonia, Dar is eitorically important or boto get tually standing ornition fromtate of a devoted collector named Riczztendee of t daily to take notes for tion of his books and monographs.

        es arrived, tors excitedly jimmied to see    and o put it mildly, to discover t a very large number of spesbore tz turned out, otions for years. It also explained    of    even duringher.

        A feer a t—“quite a distinguisleman,” I old—he hollow legs of hisZimmer frame.

        “I don’t suppose t somebody some,”

        Ricey said ful air as our of t ist of tments large tables doing i, iigative tideavor t could never be pleted and mustn’t beruss report on tion, anIndian O survey, forty-four years after tion    tiny lift Fortey and I sey cted genially and familiarly as    about te t sediments are laid down.

        ed, Fortey said to me: “t y-tudying one species of plant, St. Jo. ired in 1989,but ill es in every week.”

        “y-t?” I asked.

        “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Fortey agreed.    for a moment. “ly.” t door opeo reveal a bricked-over opening. Fortey lookedfounded. “t’s very strange,”    used to be Botany back tton for anot lengto Botany by means of backstaircases and discreet trespass t more departments ors toiledlovingly over once-living objects. And so it    I roduced to Len Ellis and t o t of us.

        ically    mosses favor trees (“t bark, ar ury mosses and lic distinguisrue mosses aren’t actuallyfussy about , mosses aren’tactually muc group of plants e    a touos, publisill to be found on manylibrary s ttempt to popularize t.

        tes is a busy realm, en taiely Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland by A. J. E. Smito seven ain and Ireland are by no means outstandingly mossy places. “tropics are old me. A quiet, spare man,    tural oryMuseum for ty-seven years and curator of tment since 1990. “You    go outinto a place like ts of Malaysia and find neies ive ease. I didt myself not long ago. I looked do had never beenrecorded.”

        “So    knoo be discovered?”

        “Oh, no. No idea.”

        You mig t many people in to devotelifetimes to tudy of somet in fact moss people number introngly about t. “Oold me, “tings    get very lively at times.”

        I asked roversy.

        “ell, ed on us by one of your trymen,” ly, andopened a y reference aining illustrations of mosses ableceristic to tructed eye y oo anot,” apping a moss, “used to be one genus, Drepanocladus. No’s been reanized intotorfia, and acoulis.”

        “And did t lead to blows?” I asked perouch hopefully.

        “ell, it made se made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of re of collesand it put all t of date for a time, so t of, you know, grumbling.”

        Mosses offer mysteries as o moss peopleanyiring type called anfordensis, y in California and later also found gro tip of England, but ered a in tions is anybody’s guess. “It’snoher revision.”

        e fully.

        must be pared o make sure t it been recorded already. tion must be ten and illustrationsprepared and t publisable journal. takesless tietury    a great age for moss taxonomy. Mucury’s ed to untangling tio beeentury.

        t ing. (You may recall t an.) Oly named Englis, ed Britis ributed to tin of several species. But it is to sucs t Len Ellis’s colle is one of t pree folded ss of orian script. Some, for all    Victorian botanist, unveiler of Broion and tament for its first ty-oneyears until    in lustrous old mas sostrikingly fi I remarked upon them.

        “Oifying a ret purc to s tfully, as if for t time in a longw know hem in bryology,” he added.

        test botanist, and t is tain Cook ced transit of Venusand claimed Australia for t else—est botanicalexpedition in ory. Banks paid ￡10,000, about $1 million in today’s moy of uralist, a secretary, tists, and four servants—on ture around t tain ade of sud pampered assemblage, but o    but admire alents in botany—a feeliy.

        Never before or sinical party enjoyed greater triumply it ook in so male-knoierra del Fuego, tai, Neralia, Ne mostly it e andiive collector. Even i for tod made new discoveries.

        Not seems, escaped ice. Altoget back ty tspes, including fourteen    seen before—enougo increase by about aquarter ts in the world.

        But Banks’s grand cac of total     absurdlyacquisitive age. Plant colleg iury became a kind of iionalmania. Glory aanists andadventurers    to t incredible lengto satisfy ticulturaly. ttall, teria after Caspar istar, came toAmerica as an uneducated printer but discovered a passion for plants and ing hings never seen before.

        Jo years in ting onbe and emerged at lengto find t Russia    o ract. Fraser took everyto Cers, and otica to a deligry.

        finds. Joeur botanist, spent t cleared almost $200,000 in today’smoney for s. Many,    did it for tany. Nuttall gave most ofanic Gardeually or of anic Garden and auts (e but alsely typeset).

        And t    plants. ts, mosquitoes, and ote, as Jonat noted in some famous lines:

        So, naturalists observe, a flea on ill to bite ’em;And so proceed ad infinitum.

        All tion o be filed, ordered, and pared    was known.

        te for a em of classification. Fortuood ready to provide it.

        er co tocratiLinné), but inized form Carolus Linnaeus.    in sout ambitious Lute, and    t ed faticed s, nearly apprenticed o a cobbler. Appalled at t of spending alifetime banging tacks into leated, and er in. udied medie inSill inies, o produce catalogues of t and animal species, using asystem of his own devising, and gradually his fame grew.

        Rarely able ness.    mucime penning long and flattering portraits of    ter botanist or zoologist,” and t em of classificatioa tly ed t one sion Princeps Botani, “Prince of Botanists.” It o question s. t to fihem.

        Linnaeus’s otriking quality    times, one migion icularly struck by ty betain bivalvesand to ts of one species of clam s by ture of tive ans andendoingly antions of floo “promiscuous intercourse,” “barren es,”

        and “te i-quoted passage:

        Love es even to ts. Males and females . . . ials . . .

        she flowers’

        leaves serve as a bridal bed,    sts t t te tials er solemnity. ime for to embrace o her.

        s Clitoria. Not surprisingly, many people t range.

        But em of classification ible. Before Linnaeus, plants    ive. toserratis. Linnaeus lopped it back to Pa, ill uses. t enciesof naming. A botanist could not be sure ifRosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro    t otris inodora seu a. Linnaeus solved t by calling it simply Rosa a. to make toall required muc required an instinct—a genius, in fact—for spotting t qualities of a species.

        tem is so ablis ive, butbefore Linnaeus, systems of classification eegorized by ed, terrestrial or aquatic, large or small,even y to man. Anatomical siderations barely came into it. Linnaeusmade it o rectify t oits ptributes. taxonomy—ion—has neverlooked back.

        It all took time, of course. t edition of    Systema Naturae in 1735 fourteen pages long. But it greil by tion—t t Linnaeuso see—it exteo t and animal. eneralis Plantarum in England, pleted a geionearlier, covered no fes alo oucy, order, simplicity, and timeliness. tes from t didn’t bee il t in timeto make Linnaeus a kind of fato Britisuralists. Noer enty s Sto).

        Linnaeus    flarous humans”

        ive travelers. Amongt yet mastered tof speecus, “man ail.” But t , analtoget Josepook a keen and believing iin a series of reported sigtis at teentury. For t part,    by sound and oftenbrilliant taxonomy. Among ots,    rial animals in ter alia), whio one had done before.

        In tended only to give eac a genus name and a number—volvulus 1, volvulus 2,and so on—but soon realized t t isfactory and on t t remains at t of tem to tentiinally o use tem for everytever existed in nature. Not everyone embraced tem urbed by its tendency tos and animals ily vulgar. ts supposed diuretic properties, and ot, naked ladies, tay untingly survive inEnglis. tance, does not refer to t all events, it    t tural sces ain dismay indisc t ted Prince of Botas ions asClitoria, Fornicata, andVulva.

        Over tly dropped (t all: t still anso Crepidula fornicata) and many otsintroduced as tural sces greicular temered by trodu of additional uralists for over a o use in the 1750s and 1760s.

        But p ed until 1876 (by t reated as intercil early iury. For a time zoologists usedfamily s placed order, to the occasional fusion of nearly everyone.

        1Linnaeus o six categories: mammals, reptiles, birds, fiss, and “vermes,” or    didn’t fit into t five. From tset it    t putting lobsters and so tegory as isfactory, and various neegories sucacea ed.

        Unfortuions    uniformly applied from nation to nation. Inan attempt to reestablisis of rules called tridian Code, but té Zoologiquetered s oing code. Meano use tion of Systema Naturae as tsnaming, ration used else many Ameri birdsspeury logged in different genera from their avian cousins in Europe.

        Not until 1902, at an early meeting of ternational gress of Zoology, did naturalistsbegin at last to s of promise and adopt a universal code.

        taxonomy is described sometimes as a sd sometimes as an art, but really it’s abattleground. Even today tem t people realize. taketegory of t describes the basic body plans of all anisms.

        A feas), and ces (us and all otobae), tly in tion of obscurity. Among tter omulida (marile “penis ,tal divisions. Yet ttle agreement on    to be. Most biologists fix total at about ty, but some opt for a numberin ties, s t asurprisingly robust eig depends on er,” as the biological world.

        At ties for disagreements are eveer.

        a, ilopsovata may not be a matter t ir many nonbotanists to passion, but it    be a sourceof very lively    in t quarters. t to people    ty times, and tappears, t    been indepely identified at least ted States devotes t pages t out allto its ient but quite onduplications. And t is just for try.

        to deal s on tage, a body kionalAssociation for Plant taxonomy arbitrates oions of priority and duplication. At1to illustrate, a, ia, in tes, in tion, Im informed, is to italicize genus and species names, but not taxonomists employ furtribe, suborder, infraorder, parvorder, andmore.

        intervals it    Zausrock gardens) is to be knoenuissimum may no notters of tidying up tattract little notice, but imes de iably folloe 1980s tly sound stific principles) from ted to tively drab and undesirable hema.

        d tested to ttee oopa. (ttees forPteridopa, Bryopa, and Fungi, among oting to aive called teur-Général; truly an institution to cureare supposed to be rigidly applied, botanists are not indifferent to se, and in 1995 tions unias, euonymus, and a popularspecies of amaryllis from demotion, but not many species of geraniums, es are eaininglysurveyed in Ct’s tting-Shed Papers.

        Disputes and res of mucype    be found in all tally is not nearly as straigter as you mig is t    est idea—“noteven to t order of magnitude,” in t live on our pla. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million. Moreextraordinary still, acc to a report in t, as muc of t and animal species may still a discovery.

        Of t , more tcifiame, a ion in stific journals” is ate of our knoy of Life, imated types—plants, is,microbes, algae, everyt 1.4 million, but added t t    a guess. Oties    tly    around 1.5 million to 1.8million, but tral registry of to c,tion     actually knouallyknow.

        In principle you ougo be able to go to experts in ea, ask otals. Many people    done so.

        t seldom do any tc types of fungi at 70,000, ot 100,000—nearly    assertions t t assertions t ts, to 950,000 species. tand, supposedly ts, ted numbers range from 248,000 to 265,000. tmay not seem too vast a discrepancy, but it’s more ty times ts in th America.

        Putting t t of tasks. In tralian National Uy began a systematic survey of te. Ofte turned out t times several times— any of t t o sce. It took Groves four decades to untangleeveryt ively small group of easily distinguisroversial creatures. Goodness knos tempted asimilar exercise ’s estimated 20,000 types of licles.

        is certain is t t deal of life out tual quantities arenecessarily estimates based orapolations—sometimes exceedingly exparapolations. In a erry Eritution saturated a stand of een rain forest trees in Panama icide fog,ted everyt fell into s from tuallyed t seasonally to make sure    migrant species)ypes of beetle. Based on tribution of beetles else, ts in ttypes, and so on up a long cimated a figure of 30 million species ofis for tire pla—a figure er said oo servative. Ota    types, underlining t , sucably o least as muco supposition as to sce.

        Acc to treet Journal, t 10,000 active taxonomists”—not a great number , t (about $2,000 per species) and paper fifteentypes are logged per year.

        “It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!” barks Koen Maes, Belgian-bores at tional Museum in Nairobi,    to try in tumn of 2002. taxonomists in told me. “t, but I tired,”    takes eigo ten years to train a taxonomist, but none are ing along in Africa.

        “to be let go at ter seven years in Kenya, ract    being renewed. “No funds,” Maesexplained.

        riting in ture last year, tis G. ed t tige and resources” for taxonomists everyions, tempt to relate aneaxon2to existing species and classifications.” Moreover, muists’ time istaken up not    simply ing out old ones. Many,acc to Godfray, “spend most    to interpret teentury systematicists: destrug ten ie publisions orsc type material t is often in very poor dition.” Godfrayparticularly stresses ttention being paid to tematizing possibilities ofter is t taxonomy by and large is still quaintly o paper.

        2tegory, sucaxa.

        In an attempt to o terprise called tion    on a database. t of sucimated at anyime employees. If, as t,    to find, and if our rates ofdiscovery ti t pace, otal for is in a littleover fifteen t of take a little longer.

        So    to t, but he principal causes:

        Most living tical terms, t al not slumber quite so tentedly if you    your mattress iso peres, o sup onyour sebaceous oils a on all t you soss. Your pilloy to t one large oily bon-bon.) And don’t tosometes, tig ly about t imated t os es and mite dung,” to quote the measuring, Dr.

        Joisomology ter. (But at least tes.

        t you snuggle up ime you climb into a motel bed.)3tes ime immemorial, but t discovered until 1965.

        If creatures as intimately associated es escaped our notitil television, it’s    most of t of to us. Go out into a    all—bend doeria, most of to sce. Yoursample ain pers, some 200,000 tle fungiknoed rotifers, flatures knoivelyas cryptozoa. A large portion of these will also be unknown.

        t preematicBacteriology, lists about 4,000 types of bacteria. In tists,Jostein Goks?yr and Vigdis torsvik, collected a gram of random soil from a beeearts bacterial tent. t tained bete bacterial species, more traveled to a coastal location a fe it tained 4,000 to 5,000 otypes exist in tefrom ties in Norats?” ell, acc to oimate, it could be as high as 400 million.

        3e are actually getting    some matters of    toemperature s o proliferate. As s it: "If you emperatures, all you get is er lice."e don’t look in t places. In ty of Life, ilson describes anist spent a feramping around ten ares of jungle in Borneo and discovered at—more ts    o find. It’s just t no one ional Museum told me t    to one cloud forest, asmountaintop forests are knoicularly dedicatedlooking” found four neing neree. “Big tree,”    to daner. Cloud forests are found on tops of plateaus and imes beenisolated for millions of years. “te for biology and tudied,” he said.

        Overall, tropical rain forests cover only about 6 pert of Eart s animal life and about ts flos, and most of to us because too fe ially,muce valuable. At least 99 pert of flos ested for ties. Because t flee from predators, plants o trive cicularly enricriguing pounds. Evennoer of all prescribed medies are derived from just forty plants,    ing from animals or microbes, so tare of forest felled of losing medically vital possibilities. Using a metorial cry, cs    gee forty t a time in labs,but ts are random and not unonly useless,    calls “timate sing programme: overtion.”

        Looking for t simply a matter of traveling to remote or distant places,ey notes    bacterium ry pub “ions”—a discovery t o involve rare amounts of lud devotion andpossibly some oty not specified.

        t enougs.tock of to be found, examined, and recordedvery mus tists available to do it. take ttle-knoifers. t    survive almostanytions are tougo a pact s, and    for better times. In tate, you    drop to boiling er orfreeze t to absolute zero—t is toms give up—and,    uro a more pleasing enviro, t 500 species ified(t nobody ely, oget all t    to ted amateur, a London clerical ime. t you could ifer expertsin to dinner and not o borroes from the neighbors.

        Even sometant and ubiquitous as fungi—and fungi are bottraparatively little notice. Fungi are everyo    a sampling—and t in volumest most of us little suspect. Gatogetypical aeadinal anisms. itfungi tato bligcce’s foot, but alsono yogurts or beers et 70,000 species of fungi ified,but it is t t of mycologists ry, making d t is o say ivelyinvolved in researc ake it t to be foundto find them.

        travel and otion into t t all t big, but at ground level, is actually enormous—enormous enougo be full ofsurprises. t liviive of to exist insubstantial numbers in ts of Zaire—total population is estimated at pery t its existence    even suspected until tietury. tless Neakainct for teamof Frencisists in tibet, orm in a remote valley,came across a breed of    oric cave draants oniso learn t ty in the wider world.

        Some    people    ter    surprises may a us. “A leading Britis,” e t in 1995, “t of giant ground slotand as nesses of the Amazon basin.”

        Perly, t    named; perly,not slotegorically sayt no sucil every jungly glade igated, and we are a longway from ac.

        But even if co ters of t    be effort enoug is. Life’sextraordinary fedity is amazing, even gratifying, but also problematic. to survey it all, youurn over every rock, sift tter on every forest floor, sieveunimaginable quantities of sand and dirt, climb into every forest opy, and devise muc o examiems. Intered a deep cave in Romania t side    unknoy-ts andotures—spiders, tipedes, lice—all blind, colorless, and neo sce.

        turn were feeding on springs.

        Our instinct may be to see ty of trag everytrating,dispiriting, per it    just as    unbearablyexg. e live on a pla e capacity to surprise. reasoning person could possibly    it any other way?

        is nearly al arresting in any ramble ttered disciplines ofmodern sce is realizing o devote lifetimes to t sumptuously esoteries of inquiry. In one of epes o fifty years, from 1906 to ly studying a genus of land snails in Polynesia called Partula. Over and over, yearafter year, Crampton measured to ti degree—to eigle curves of numberless Partula, piling ts into fastidiously detailedtables. A single line of text in a Crampton table could represent    andcalculation.

        Only sliged, aainly more ued,    before o speak, Kinsey omologist, and a dogged o. In one expedition lasting tion of300,000 , alas, recorded.

        Somet ion of    be many institutions in trequire or are prepared to support specialists in barnacles or Pacifiails. As ed at tural ory Museum in London, I asked Ricey    ake his place.

        ily at my é. “I’m afraid it’s not as if utessitting on ting to be called in to play.    retires or,even more unfortunately, dies, t    bring a stop to t field, sometimes for avery long while.”

        “And I suppose t’s udying asingle species of plant, even if it doesn’t produyterribly new?”

        “Precisely,” o mean it.
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