LITMIR.BIZ

      To the scientific name is added the namer: Abra cadabra Eames and Wilkins, 1957, or Colymbosathon ecplecticos Siveter et al. 2003. This is so that readers will know who first described the organism concerned, and when. It is remarkable how many plants familiar to Europeans were named first by Linnaeus – certainly almost all the common flowering plants. Botanists like their authors to be abbreviated, and Linnaeus is abbreviated to a bald ‘L.’ – hence, bloody cranesbill is Geranium sanguineum L. The works of Linnaeus are taken as the starting point for all modern scientific names, and everything published earlier is arbitrarily neglected. The beginning of modern nomenclature for plants is his Species Plantarum of 1753, and for animals the tenth edition of Systema Naturae, 1758. Fungi are different, since Linnaeus did not have much to say about them. The greatest early mycological figure, the ‘Linnaeus of mushrooms’, was another Swede called Elias Fries, who seemed to have an almost uncanny memory for these most fleeting ‘vegetable productions of nature’; in fact, modern molecular studies have shown that fungi are not really vegetables at all. His great work published between 1821 and 1832 is a conscious homage to Linnaeus, the Systema Mycologicum, and hence mushroom names go back to 1821, although Fries is said to ‘validate’ certain still earlier names, such as that for the familiar fly agaric, Amanita muscaria, the archetypal red mushroom with white ‘spots’, which Linnaeus had already included in his remit. Quite why Sweden, and in particular the University of Uppsala, should have had such a grip of the system of nature is an interesting question. I went to see Linnaeus’ farmhouse outside Uppsala at Hammarby to find out if it offered any clues. It is a simple wooden building, now painted maroon, with neat white square windows, no different from a hundred others in the more agricultural part of Sweden – sensible, four square and with a proper feeling for place. Maybe the clue was in the very modesty of the structure; nothing showy, just a monument to hard and consistent work – farmers’ virtues, Swedish virtues, Lutheran seriousness.

      So far I have said rather a lot about names, but not much about science. The real business of taxonomy is to look closely at the animal or plant in question to assess its features, the business of identification. Only then can you identify a new and unnamed species, or establish whether a previous observer was mistaken about its systematic position. There is no way of generalizing this process, since every different kind of animal or plant is a distinct proposition. If you are ‘spider man’ you don’t climb up walls to save the world as we know it, but you do know a tremendous amount about spider genitalia, because that is the best feature by which to recognize a species. The fern woman will look at the spore capsules on the back of the fronds, and appreciate subtle difference in the way the fronds are subdivided. Flowers and leaves will be the traditional bailiwick of the botanist; spores and microscopic cellular structures on the gill edge will be the province of the fungus man. A crustacean expert will peruse the finest details of the legs and the antennae of his object of study. A mollusc specialist might appraise the colour and ornament of a marine snail, while a lepidopterist will be as familiar with the speckles and dappling of a butterfly wing as he would be with the faces of his own family. One lepidopterist I knew was actually rather more aware of the former than he was of the latter. An ornithologist might listen to songs, spotting their individuality at species or racial level, but then so will an expert on cicadas or bats. Many specialists will take themselves off to the electron microscope, which will afford crisp photographs of the tiniest of organs or ornament on the smallest of animals: bryozoans (‘sea mats’) stand revealed as decorators as virtuosic as Islamic ceramicists; a tiny mite encrusted with horns and growths as Gothic as an extra in a Dracula movie; the cells of a parasite beautifully embroidered with the equipment they need to carry out their depredations; the teeth – radula – of a mollusc as distinctive as a rack of stalagmites. The palaeontologist will have fewer details at his disposal, and so will be obliged to read as much as he can from the testimony of bones or shells – the wonderfully symmetric test of a sea urchin, the calcite exoskeleton of a trilobite, the tiny pollen grains of a plant that has long vanished from the earth.

      The next stage is the library. Although memory is important in identifying specimens, sooner or later it must be checked against the printed record. This is the point where the scientist takes himself or herself off to the journals and monographs, wherein will be found descriptions and synopses of species related to the one under the microscope. The appropriate number of the journal will be found in a catalogue, nowadays on a computer, and then the hunt around the miles of shelves will begin. If a new species is to be named it is important to

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