Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything

When the man departed, Fortey said to me: “That was a very nice chap named Norman who’s spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John’s wort. He retired in 1989, but he still comes in every week.”

“How do you spend forty-two years on one species of plant?” I asked.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Fortey agreed. He thought for a moment. “He’s very thorough apparently.” The lift door opened to reveal a bricked-over opening. Fortey looked confounded. “That’s very strange,” he said. “That used to be Botany back there.” He punched a button for another floor, and we found our way at length to Botany by means of back staircases and discreet trespass through yet more departments where investigators toiled lovingly over once-living objects. And so it was that I was introduced to Len Ellis and the quiet world of bryophytes-mosses to the rest of us.

When Emerson poetically noted that mosses favor the north sides of trees (“The moss upon the forest bark, was pole-star when the night was dark”) he really meant lichens, for in the nineteenth century mosses and lichens weren’t distinguished. True mosses aren’t actually fussy about where they grow, so they are no good as natural compasses. In fact, mosses aren’t actually much good for anything. “Perhaps no great group of plants has so few uses, commercial or economic, as the mosses,” wrote Henry S. Conard, perhaps just a touch sadly, in How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts , published in 1956 and still to be found on many library shelves as almost the only attempt to popularize the subject.

They are, however, prolific. Even with lichens removed, bryophytes is a busy realm, with over ten thousand species contained within some seven hundred genera. The plump and stately Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland by A. J. E. Smith runs to seven hundred pages, and Britain and Ireland are by no means outstandingly mossy places. “The tropics are where you find the variety,” Len Ellis told me. A quiet, spare man, he has been at the Natural History Museum for twenty-seven years and curator of the department since 1990. “You can go out into a place like the rain forests of Malaysia and find new varieties with relative ease. I did that myself not long ago. I looked down and there was a species that had never been recorded.”

“So we don’t know how many species are still to be discovered?”

“Oh, no. No idea.”

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. “Oh, yes,” Ellis told me, “the meetings can get very lively at times.”

I asked him for an example of controversy.

“Well, here’s one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen,” he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. “That,” he said, tapping a moss, “used to be one genus, Drepanocladus . Now it’s been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis .”

“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.

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.