ural ory Museum in London, built into recesses along t corridors or standing betricuryor so of otive clutter, are secret doors—at least secret in t t to attract tor’s notice. Occasionally you migracted manner and interestingly 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 public knows and adores.

    tural ory Museum contains some seventy million objects from every realm oflife and every corner 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 insects pinned to squaresof card, dras. It is a little like room alone een miles of saining jar upon jar of animals preserved inmeted 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 specimensbore tz turned out, otions for years. It also explained  of  even duringher.

    A feer a cment—“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 intent, investigative tic endeavor t could never be completed and mustn’t beruss report on tion, anIndian Ocean 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 comes in every week.”

    “y-t?” I asked.

    “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Fortey agreed.  for a moment. “ly.” t door opened to reveal a bricked-over opening. Fortey lookedconfounded. “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 noted t 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 touco Knos, publisill to be found on manylibrary s ttempt to popularize t.

    tes is a busy realm, en tained ately 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 can 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 can get very lively at times.”

    I asked roversy.

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

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

    “ell, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collectionsand 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 anyo exist in tions is anybody’s guess. “It’snoher revision.”

    e nodded tfully.

    must be compared 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 tions left beeentury.

    t ing. (You may recall t C moss man.) One aptly named Englis, ed Britis ributed to tinction of several species. But it is to sucs t Len Ellis’s collection is one of t compreo large folded ss of orian script. Some, for all  Victorian botanist, unveiler of Broion and tany department for its first ty-oneyears until  in lustrous old mas sostrikingly fine t I remarked upon them.

    “Oifying a recent 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 money, to bringy of nine oturalist, a secretary, tists, and four servants—on ture around t tain Cookmade of sucy and pampered assemblage, but o  but admire alents in botany—a feeling serity.

    Never before or since anical party enjoyed greater triumply it ook in so many netle-knoierra del Fuego, tai, Neralia, Ne mostly it e andinventive collector. Even ine,ed t for tock and made new discoveries.

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

    But Banks’s grand cac of total   absurdlyacquisitive age. Plant collecting in teentury became a kind of internationalmania. Glory and ed tanists andadventurers  to t incredible lengto satisfy ticulturalnovelty. 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 Gardens. Eventually or of anic Garden and auts (e but also largely 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 needed to be filed, ordered, and compared  was known.

    te for a em of classification. Fortunately tood ready to provide it.

    er co tocraticvonLinné), 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 inction. udied medicine 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 classification estac in tly ed t one sion Princeps Botanicorum, “Prince of Botanists.” It o question s. t to find terthem.

    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 organs andendoingly antions of floo “promiscuous intercourse,” “barren concubines,”

    and “te in one oft-quoted passage:

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

    she flowers’

    leaves serve as a bridal bed,  scents 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 canina. Linnaeus solved t by calling it simply Rosa canina. 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 en  becategorized by ed, terrestrial or aquatic, large or small,even y to man. Anatomical considerations 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 extended to t and animal. Otoria Generalis Plantarum in England, completed a generationearlier, covered no fes alone—but oucency, order, simplicity, and timeliness. tes from t didn’t become il t in timeto make Linnaeus a kind of fato Britisuralists. Noer enty s Stockholm).

    Linnaeus  flarous humans”

    ive travelers. Amongt yet mastered tof speecus, “man ail.” But t , analtoget Josepook a keen and believing interestin a series of reported sigtis at teentury. For t part,  by sound and oftenbrilliant taxonomy. Among ots,  rial animals in ter coMammalia), which no one had done before.

    In tended only to give eac a genus name and a number—Convolvulus 1, Convolvulus 2,and so on—but soon realized t t isfactory and on t t remains at t of tem to tention originally 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, tcoions may untingly survive inEnglis. tance, does not refer to t all events, it  t tural sciences ain dismay indiscovering t ted Prince of Botany exts ions asClitoria, Fornicata, andVulva.

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

    But p coined until 1876 (by t reated as intercil early in tietury. For a time zoologists usedfamily s placed order, to the occasional confusion 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.

    Unfortunately tions  uniformly applied from nation to nation. Inan attempt to reestablisis of rules called tricklandian Code, but té Zoologiquecountered s oing code. Meano use tion of Systema Naturae as tsnaming, ration used else many American birdsspent teentury logged in different genera from their avian cousins in Europe.

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

    taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and 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 organisms.

    A feaceans), and ces (us and all otobackbone), tly in tion of obscurity. Among tter omulida (marine tle “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 even greater.

    a, or Aegilopsovata may not be a matter t ir many nonbotanists to passion, but it can be a sourceof very lively  in t quarters. t to people  ty times, and tappears, t  been independently identified at least ted States devotes t pages to sorting out allto its inadvertent but quite commonduplications. And t is just for try.

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

    intervals it  Zausc inrock gardens) is to be knoenuissimum may no notters of tidying up tattract little notice, but imes do,srage inevitably folloe 1980s tly sound scientific principles) from ted to tively drab and undesirable hema.

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

    Disputes and reorderings of mucype can 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 planet. Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million. Moreextraordinary still, according to a report in t, as muc of t and animal species may still a discovery.

    Of t , more tcific name, a ion in scientific journals” is ate of our knoy of Life, imated types—plants, insects,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 eacion, 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 University began a systematic survey of te. Oftentimes it turned out t times several times— any of t t o science. 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 on extrapolations—sometimes exceedingly expansiveextrapolations. In a erry Eritution saturated a stand of nineteen 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 ofinsects for tire planet—a figure er said oo conservative. Ota  types, underlining t , sucably o least as muco supposition as to science.

    According 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-bornebrates 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 coming 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, mucaxonomists’ time istaken up not  simply ing out old ones. Many,according to Godfray, “spend most of trying to interpret teentury systematicists: deconstructing ten inadequate publisions orscouring type material t is often in very poor condition.” Godfrayparticularly stresses ttention being paid to tematizing possibilities ofternet. t 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 continue at t pace, otal for insects in a littleover fifteen t of take a little longer.

    So  to count, but he principal causes:

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

    Joisomology Center. (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 notice until television, it’s  most of t of to us. Go out into a  all—bend doeria, most of to science. Yoursample ain pers, some 200,000 tle fungiknoed rotifers, flatures knoivelyas cryptozoa. A large portion of these will also be unknown.

    t compreematicBacteriology, lists about 4,000 types of bacteria. In tists,Jostein Goks?yr and Vigdis torsvik, collected a gram of random soil from a beec nearts bacterial content. t tained bete bacterial species, more traveled to a coastal location a fe it contained 4,000 to 5,000 otypes exist in tefrom ties in Norats?” ell, according to one estimate, it could be as high as 400 million.

    3e are actually getting  some matters of  toemperature s o proliferate. As s it: quot;If you emperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.quot;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 dance ner. 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 percent of Eart s animal life and about ts flos, and most of to us because too fe incidentally,muce valuable. At least 99 percent of flos ested for ties. Because t flee from predators, plants o contrive cicularly enricriguing compounds. Evennoer of all prescribed medicines are derived from just forty plants,  coming from animals or microbes, so tare of forest felled of losing medically vital possibilities. Using a metorial cry, cs can generate forty t a time in labs,but ts are random and not uncommonly useless,  calls “timate screening 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 luckand devotion andpossibly some oty not specified.

    t enougs.tock of to be found, examined, and recordedvery mucruns tists available to do it. take ttle-knoifers. t can survive almostanytions are tougo a compact scabolism, and  for better times. In tate, you can drop to boiling er orfreeze t to absolute zero—t is toms give up—and,  urned to a more pleasing environment, 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 bottractscomparatively little notice. Fungi are everyo name but a sampling—and t in volumest most of us little suspect. Gatogetypical acre of meado marginal organisms. itfungi tato bligcce’s foot, but alsono yogurts or beers or coget 70,000 species of fungi ified,but it is t t of mycologists ry, making cs and 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 living relative 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 tcorners of t  be effort enoug is. Life’sextraordinary fecundity 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 canopy, and devise muc o examine tems. Intered a deep cave in Romania t side  unknoy-ts andotures—spiders, centipedes, lice—all blind, colorless, and neo science.

    turn were feeding on springs.

    Our instinct may be to see ty of tracking everytrating,dispiriting, per it can just as  unbearablyexciting. e live on a planet t e capacity to surprise. reasoning person could possibly  it any other way?

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

    Only sliged, and certainly more unexpected,  before o speak, Kinsey omologist, and a dogged one att. 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 Pacific snails. As ed at tural ory Museum in London, I asked Ricey  ake his place.

    ily at my naiveté. “I’m afraid it’s not as if utessitting on ting to be called in to play.  retires or,even more unfortunately, dies, t can 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 produce anyterribly new?”

    “Precisely,” o mean it.