The Secret Museum

Willughby had been Ray’s student and the two travelled together studying and collecting birds and fish. When Willughby suddenly died, Ray saw his three books – about birds, fish and games – through the press. The twosome’s collection of birds and fish is stored at Willughby’s family home, Wollaton Hall, which, incidentally, starred as Wayne Manor in the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.

Back in 2010, Keith had the pleasure of showing Newton’s Principia to some Apollo astronauts – Gene Cernan, Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell – when they visited the Royal Society. He really enjoyed their visit. ‘I am a child of the sixties; that is why I got into all of this,’ he told me.

As they turned the pages of the tome, Gene Cernan talked about how he had experienced Newton’s third law of motion – that every action has an equal and opposite reaction – first hand, in space. When he flew on Gemini 9, he had to assemble a backpack in zero gravity, with little light, outside the spacecraft. Nothing was holding him anywhere, so as he tightened a valve, his entire body span in the opposite direction. Everything he touched would touch him back and send him tumbling back out into space. When he touched the spacecraft, it repelled him. He had trouble getting back inside and when he finally made it his boots were filled with sweat.

From then on, NASA put hand and footholds on its space capsules so that the astronauts could anchor themselves in space. The astronauts were also trained in water so they could experience weightlessness. By the time Cernan flew to the moon with Harrison Schmitt, on Apollo 17, he knew how to get around without gravity.

When the Royal Society lent their fragment of Newton’s apple tree to NASA astronaut Piers Sellers to take up to the space station, they also sent along a picture of Sir Isaac Newton. The crew put it in the window of the space station so that Newton could look out: they thought he would have liked the view. Imagine what Newton might have come up with, if he’d had the chance to spend time up there with them, quietly looking around at the universe getting on with what it does, and figuring out how things work.

[Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727)] Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. In the garden grew a Flower of Kent apple tree connected with the tale of Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation – a story which Newton himself started.

[Newton’s Apple Tree by Thomas Howison] If you look really closely you can see a ghostly figure of Sir Isaac Newton sitting on a branch of the fallen tree.

[Newton’s reflecting telescope] Newton sent a sketch of his Invention to the Royal Society. I saw it in their library. He included a sketch of his eye, looking down into the telescope. I was able to put my own eye to the telescope, just as he would have done centuries ago.

[Newton’s Principia] The Royal Society has the original proof copy of Newton’s masterpiece Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, down in the basement.

[Two pieces of Newton’s apple tree] A piece of the apple tree that inspired Newton was taken onto the space station, along with a photograph of Newton, below.

Imagine what Newton might have come up with, if he’d had the chance to spend time aboard the space station.

‘YOU COULD SAY THIS ENTIRE room is a hidden treasure,’ said the curator of the Linnean Society as the door swung open to their basement storage facility. She flicked the lights on to reveal a wood-panelled room lined with 1,600 books and drawers filled with 14,000 plants, 3,198 insects and 1,564 shells, which were the private collection of Carl Linnaeus, the man who named the natural world.

Carl von Linné (1707–78), who was born Carl Linnaeus, was a Swedish botanist. He standardized the system of scientifically naming plants with two Latin names, the genus (e.g. Ginkgo), followed by the species (e.g. biloba). This is called binomial nomenclature, and it is now used internationally for all plants and animals, even us humans. We are in the genus Homo and our species is sapiens, hence Homo sapiens, ‘the wise man’. Linnaeus came up with our name.

It’s a really clever system if you think about it, because anyone around the world can understand what plant or creature you are talking about. It’s essential for botanists, zoologists and museum curators caring for collections of specimens.

When a new species is discovered, scientists must explain to other scientists what it is and what it looks like. So the first thing they do is pick one member of the species as a holotype, or ‘type’, specimen. This is the example of the new species that will forever define it and is often the first example of the species found. Most of these ‘types’ are in museums around the world; thousands of them are in this room because Linnaeus gave them their scientific names.

There is not, as yet, a type for Homo sapiens. A palaeontologist named Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97) asked for the job in his will, but he turned out to have syphilis, so was struck off the list. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been proposed. Many say it ought to be Linnaeus, as he came up with the idea. His body is well preserved in the cathedral in Uppsala, Sweden, so there is a chance of this happening yet.

The specimens housed at the Linnean Society used to be in Uppsala, in Linnaeus’s home, where he lived with his family. When Linnaeus died, Joseph Banks (1747–1820) – the director of Kew Gardens and a passionate botanist – tried to buy the collection, but in the end a young student of his, James Edward Smith, bought it with money he borrowed from his father, and shipped the whole lot to London, where he founded the Linnean Society.

This is the cave of riches that I went to see. It is just inside the entrance to the Royal Academy of Arts. I met the librarian, Lynda Brooks, in the library, and we ventured downstairs to the basement, where the collection lives. She turned a key that opened a door into Linnaeus’s world.

The entire room smells like a lovely combination of old books and wood polish. The top shelves are filled with books Linnaeus wrote himself, and his reference books. The lower drawers and shelves are filled with thousands of insect, shell and plant specimens collected by him and by his ‘apostles’ – his students, who collected around the world for him. These men of science would also act as pastors, priests or doctors whilst on collecting expeditions.

We began with the plants. Linnaeus pressed each one carefully, described it and gave it a scientific name, and then stored it away. Later, these were parcelled up, so each plant is now a brown paper package tied up with green string, each one stacked upon another. We unwrapped one package and, inside, we found the type specimen for Delphinium. Two hundred and fifty years after Linnaeus named it Delphinium (after the Latin for ‘dolphin’, because of the shape its flower makes as it opens, like a dolphin leaping out of the waves), it is still a vivid blue colour because it has been kept in storage, out of the light. This is just one in his library of thousands of plants.

We also unwrapped what was for Linnaeus a very special flower, Linnaea borealis, which was named after him and became his signature flower. If ever you see a painting of him, look for the flower. He usually has it draped through his fingers. When alive, it is pink, and its delicate petals carpet the floor of woodland in Sweden. At night, the pink burns in the darkness. The type specimen in the archive has turned brown over the centuries, unlike the delphinium. Pink and red flowers lose their vibrancy more quickly than blue and yellow ones.

Scientific names aren’t just for scientists. They tell stories. Buttercups are in the Ranunculus genus. They often grow near water and ranunculus is the Late Latin word for ‘little frog’, a species also found near the water. Water lilies are in the genus Nymphaea, after the water nymphs in Greek myths. The laurel Kalmia was named by Linnaeus for his Swedish student Pehr Kalm; the black mangrove Avicennia he named for the Persian physician Avicenna. He also reused classical names: Acer (maples), Quercus (oaks). The only plant Linnaeus named after a female body part is a blue vine popularly called a ‘butterfly pea’; he gave it the genus Clitoria. If you look up your favourite plant, it is bound to have a good story hiding in its scientific name.

The same goes for animals. Some animals Linnaeus named descriptively, like the southern flying squirrel, Glaucomys volans (‘the white mouse that flies’); in others, he added things that made him smile. He named the blue whale – the largest animal that has ever lived on earth – Balaenoptera musculus. In Latin, musculus means ‘little mouse’. He named the house mouse at the same time: Mus musculus. There are no mammals in the basement room of the Linnean Society – though some do still survive in Sweden – but there are a lot of fish pressed on to paper, their skin flattened as if they were flowers, as well as corals, shells and insects.

There is also, in among them, a little box that contains pearls made by Linnaeus. They are the first artificial pearls ever cultured in a mollusc. He made the pearls by jamming a piece of limestone into a freshwater mussel, Unio pictorum (the ‘painter’s mussel’, so called because artists would use the shallow valves to mix their pigment), and holding it there so the mussel would create a pearl around it. Then he put the mussel back into the river for six years, giving the pearl time to grow.

The pearls are small and roundish, apart from one elongated brown one that looks like it went a bit wrong. One has been cut in half, so I could see the irritant he put inside it to make the mussel form the pearl. It looks like a seed in the middle of the pearl.

Linnaeus sold his secret in 1762 to a Swedish merchant called Peter Bagge who got a permit from the king to make pearls, but even though he paid 6,000 dalars (more than £93,000 today) for a monopoly on the right to make pearls, he never got around to making any. Linnaeus once said that he wished he’d become famous for creating these pearls rather than for classifying nature. After taking a good look, we put them back in their box, in their drawer, and closed it shut.

Next, we took down some books. The first was a green leatherbound book with ‘LINNAEUS’ embossed in gold letters on the front. It was his journal from a trip he made to Lapland. It is filled with his notes, in his slanting handwriting, on the people, flowers and creatures of Lapland, and wonderful – if not that competent – drawings of local life.

We turned the pages and saw his charming sketches of ploughs, fish, skis, insects, coral, local Laplanders, embroidery on Sami clothing and tents. There were drawings of how the Lapps slept, ate, dried fish and even the kinds of games they played (throwing balls and a game that looks like chess). There is a beautiful sketch of a crane fly, and an interesting one of Andromeda being threatened by a sea monster beside one of an Andromeda plant being threatened by a newt. I really liked his drawing of an owlet and one of a Sami baby wrapped up cosily.

He tells how to cure chilblains with roasted reindeer cheese, how to fix a broken pot by boiling it in milk and how to make thread from reindeer hooves. He described the singing in Lapland: ‘No Laplander can sing, but instead of singing utters a noise resembling the barking of dogs.’

The journal was published as Iter Laponicum but it was brilliant to see the real thing, written in Lapland. Linnaeus brought it back to his home in Uppsala, along with a drum and a Lapp costume. There is a painting of him wearing it holding the drum and his Linnaea borealis plant, in the library upstairs at the Linnean Society.

I’d been told that Linnaeus was the first person to grow a banana in Europe, so I asked Lynda whether there was anything banana related in the collection. She opened up a book called Musa Cliffortiana Florens Hartecampi, all about that first banana. It was grown in the garden of Linnaeus’s friend George Clifford, in Holland. Musa is the genus for banana; it was named from musz, which is the Arabic word for ‘banana’; or perhaps for the nine Greek muses themselves. Inside the book is a fold-out drawing of the fruiting banana plant. It ends with a question: ‘Will my banana grow for years?’

Lynda then showed me Linnaeus’s most famous work, Systema Naturae. Published in 1735, it’s a history of all the living things he knew about at the time, divided up according to his sexual system for classifying them. He caused a bit of a scandal at the time by suggesting plants had a sex life. There are so many names he adopted which we still use today; magnolia, clematis, digitalis, jasmine, fuchsia, salvia.

Animals are included in the Systema, written down in a table, according to the genus Linnaeus assigned to them. If there was an animal he wasn’t sure about, he put it in ‘Worms’. He put humans in the same box as apes, which he didn’t want to do, but he couldn’t see a way around it. Anything he wasn’t sure actually existed he put in a box called ‘Paradoxa’, which contains the satyr, phoenix, dragon, unicorn and pelican. He wasn’t sure he believed in pelicans, because they were supposed to feed their young on their own blood. He also named stones, fossils and minerals. This first edition copy was huge, the only one that was published in such a big format. Linnaeus used to fold it into four and carry it around with him.

There are two bookcases filled with copies of Linnaeus’s work. He had many of his own publications bound with blank pages between printed ones so that he could make his own notes as he reread his books and update them as he found new species. His handwritten ideas are all over the blank pages, mostly in Latin. This room is the only place in the world where there are so many copies of Linnaeus’s books covered in his own annotations.

The day I visited the collection, thousands of Homo sapiens were rushing straight past the doors of the Linnean Society to see the David Hockney exhibition. I saw it too. Just think of all those flowers Hockney painted all over Yorkshire, some buried under snow, others popping up into the sunlight after the winter underground, each one with a scientific name, many of them coined by Linnaeus.

The entire collection has recently been digitized and is up on the Linnaean Society’s website. Researchers around the world look things up regularly, leaving the centuries old collections undisturbed in their wood-panelled room. There is a postcard of Linnaeus in there, propped up against the books, watching over the lot.

[The world of Linnaeus] I went to see thousands of specimens and books that belonged to Linnaeus. They were brought from his home in Sweden to London, and were used to found the Linnean Society.

[Linnaea borealis] Linnaeus’s signature flower, the twinflower or Linnaea borealis, named in his honour.

[Linnaeus’s pearls] Linnaeus was the first person to culture artificial pearls in a mollusc. Some of his pearls turned out better than others.

[Andromeda] Linnaeus drew this sketch inside the journal that he wrote while in Lapland.

[Systema Naturae] The first edition of Systema Naturae had only 11 pages but Linnaeus added to the book over the years, adding new species as he discovered them. The 13th edition appeared in 1770 and was 3,000 pages long. ‘God created – Linnaeus organized.’ That was how Linnaeus summed up his lifetime achievements.

THEY ARE SEEDS, INSIDE KEW’S Millennium Seed Bank (MSB). This particular seed is Lamourouxia viscosa from Mexico and is one of millions stored there. It has a lovely honeycomb cage, so that it can float in the air and spread the range of its plant. I like the design of this seed but, really, I could have chosen any of the seeds preserved in the vaults of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, because each is unique and precious.

Seeds first appeared on Earth some 360 million years ago, and since then they have spread across all environments. They are amazingly diverse, come in all kinds of shapes and range in size from the largest seed in the world, the coco de mer palm (Lodoicea maldivica) from the Seychelles, which looks like a big, curvaceous bottom (Linnaeus called it Lodoicea callipyge, callipyge meaning ‘lovely-bummed’) to orchid seeds the size of a speck of dust.

Some seeds can remain alive in the ground for hundreds of years if need be, until the conditions are just right for them to germinate. A date palm seed estimated to be 2,000 years old was discovered in 1963 when Herod the Great’s fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea was excavated. It was planted in 2005, and now Methuselah, as the plant is called, stands over a metre high. The amazing ability that seeds have to pause in time was the inspiration behind the Millenium Seed Bank Partnership.

Wolfgang Stuppy, seed morphologist at the seed bank, showed me around. He explained that one in five species of plant on Earth is faced with extinction. In 2000, Kew began collecting seeds as life insurance for the future. They started by collecting thousands of seeds from every species of wild British flowering plant and freezing them so that, in the future, if any become extinct, we will have their seeds, here in Sussex. It will be possible to defrost them, grow them and reintroduce them to the countryside. There are about 1,400 native seed-bearing plants in the UK, and 90 per cent of them are protected here, carefully frozen for the future. Britain was the first country in the world to do this with their seeds.

The seed bank has a nursery in which it grows flowers that once adorned British meadows countrywide, such as the cuckoo flower, green field speedwell and the harebell. Slowly, the people who work there are trying to get Britain to remember its native wild beauty. Some plants that were once extinct, such as a starry aquatic herb, called starfruit, have already been reintroduced into the countryside.

The seed bank has also begun to stretch its green fingers across the world. Working with more than 50 countries worldwide, it has so far been collecting wild flowering plants that grow in the world’s dry lands. When turned into food, clothing, medicine and building materials, these flowering plants help to support 1 billion people. To date, the seed bank has saved seeds from ten per cent of the world’s wild plant species, and is adding to that number all the time. In the future, the range of seeds collected will hopefully expand to include those from the tropical rainforest, and then from all types of terrain found on the planet.

We began our trip around the seed bank in Stuppy’s office, where he showed me the seeds he particularly likes. The most beautiful, for me, are the blue seeds from the Malagasy traveller’s tree. The seeds are spread by lemurs, which are native to Madagascar. Lemurs can only see the colours blue and green, so Stuppy has a hunch that the seeds are this unique colour so that the animals can spot them and gobble them up.

We headed off down the corridor and entered a white-walled room filled with seeds. This is the drying room. When seeds first arrive at the seed bank, they are put in here. They are all still in the packing containers their countries have sent them in – plastic boxes and vials, glass jars, little freezer bags, cloth bags, paper bags, brown envelopes and packing crates. We didn’t stay long as, Stuppy explained, ‘your sinuses dry out before long’, but all newly arrived seeds stay here for at least three months.

After they have dried out, the seeds are taken next door and sieved, and subsequently put into what Stuppy calls ‘the zigzag blower’, to get rid of any fruit so that just the seed remains; these are then cleaned and x-rayed. If most of the seeds in the batch are ripe, and have no insects living inside them, they are put into containers ready to be frozen.

The actual seed bank, and the freezers that contain the collection, are underground. The entrance is through a grey door surrounded by a yellow panel set into a wall of silver. If you ever visit the public area of the seed bank, you will see a metal staircase that leads down to this door, but you can’t go down there, or through the door.

Stuppy buzzed us in. The doors reminded me a bit of the spacey ones that led into the room filled with space suits at the National Air and Space Museum’s storage unit in Suitland, outside Washington D.C. On the other side of the doors there were no space suits; instead we found ourselves in another drying room. Every seed selected for freezing is dried a final time before going into its freezer, and each seed container is numbered so that the seeds can be catalogued and found later on.

As we looked about, Stuppy was yawning rather a lot. I thought maybe he was bored by showing me around, but it turned out that his wife had just had twin boys. ‘I’ve started keeping a diary of how many times they wake me up in the night,’ he told me, ‘and last night it was eight.’

As we chatted about his twins, we looked into the freezers that lead off from this room. We couldn’t go inside, as it’s too cold in there – the staff who work there wear big jackets or fleeces. The seeds are stored at -20°C (-4°F), but a series of fans adds a wind chill factor, so it feels like -40°C (-40°F). We peered through the glass at the contents of the seed bank, stored in boxes on the grey metal shelves that line the freezers, or in drawers.

At the moment, only two freezers are filled with seeds. Freezer A contains the seeds that are taken out once a decade for testing. They are put into water and incubated to make sure that they are alive and will germinate. Freezer B’s collection contains a replica of the seeds in Freezer A, but these seeds are never touched; they stay quietly frozen for the future.