When Emerson waxes poetic about the tendency of moss to grow on the north side of trees ("On a dark night, the moss on the trunk is the Big Dipper"), he is actually referring to lichens, because Moss and lichen were indistinguishable in the 19th century. Real mosses aren't actually picky about where they grow, so they don't act as a natural north needle. In fact, moss does nothing. "Perhaps no large group of plants is so nearly useless, both commercially and economically, as mosses," wrote Henry S. Conard. This is said in the book "How to Identify Moss and Leaf Moss", and it is not without a sad taste. Published in 1956 and still found on the shelves of many libraries, it is almost the only work that attempts to popularize the subject.
However, moss is a very fertile plant. Even without lichens, mosses are still a prosperous kingdom, with about 700 genera and more than 10,000 species. A.J.E. Smith's thick book "Mosses of Britain and Ireland" is 700 pages long, but Britain and Ireland are by no means the home of outstanding mosses. “You don’t realize how many mosses are there until you get to the tropics,” Ryan Ellis told me. A quiet man of few words, he has worked at the Museum of Natural History for 27 years and has been director of the department since 1990. "If you go to a rainforest in, say, Malaysia, you can easily discover new species. I went there myself not long ago. I looked down and saw a species that had never been recorded before."
" So we don’t know how many species there are yet to be discovered?”
“Oh, that’s right.”
You might think that there are still many species left undiscovered in the world. Not many people would devote their lives to studying that humble thing, but there are literally hundreds of people who study mosses and have strong feelings about their subject. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "meetings tend to be very lively."
I asked him to give a controversial example.
"Oh, there's one right here. It was picked up by one of your compatriots." He smiled slightly and opened a heavy reference book, which contained several illustrations of moss. To the uninitiated, the most striking feature of these mosses is that they all look similar to each other. "That," he said, pointing to a type of moss, "they were originally one genus, Fusarium. Now they have been re-divided into three genera: Fusarium, Warnstorfia and Hamatacoulis."
"Everybody Did you get into a fight because of this?" I asked, maybe with a glimmer of hope.
"Gee, that makes sense. Totally makes sense. But it means spending a lot of time reorganizing the collection, and the books are out of date for a while, so there's a bit of a gripe , you know it."
He told me that there are many mysteries in moss. One famous example - well-known to people who study mosses anyway - is a solitary moss called Stanford lichens, which was discovered on the campus of Stanford University in California and was later found growing On a small road in Cornwall, England, but nowhere in between. How it could exist in two places so far apart is a mystery. "Now, it's called Stanford brown moss," Ellis said. "Another revision."
We nodded thoughtfully.
When you discover a new moss, compare it to all other mosses to see if they have been recorded before.
Then you have to write the right description, prepare the illustrations, and publish the results in a respectable magazine. The 20th century was hardly a prosperous era for moss taxonomy. Much of the century was spent cleaning up the mess and duplication left over from the 19th century.
It was a golden age for collecting moss. (You may recall that Charles Lyell's father was a big-time moss researcher.) An Englishman named George Hunt worked tirelessly in search of British mosses and may have played a role in the extinction of several mosses. . But thanks to efforts like this, the Ryan Ellis collection is one of the most comprehensive in the world. He has a total of 780,000 specimens, packed in large and thick paper books. Some are so old that the Victorians have scrawled instructions on them, and for all we know, some may have been written in Robert Brown's hand. Brown was a great botanist of the Victorian era who revealed Brownian motion and the cell nucleus. He founded the museum's botanical department and chaired it for the first 31 years until his death in 1858. All specimens are kept in shiny old mahogany cabinets. These cabinets are very beautiful and I made a few comments about them.
“Oh, that’s Sir Joseph Banks’ stuff, brought from his house in Soho Square.” Ellis said casually, as if appraising the items he had just bought from IKEA. Bought furniture, "He made these cabinets to store specimens collected from the voyage of the Endeavor." He looked at the cabinets thoughtfully, as if he had seen them for the first time in a long time, " I don't know how we ended up dealing with them in the field of bryology," he continued.
This sentence contains rich historical content. Joseph Banks was Britain's greatest botanist, and the Endeavor voyage—the voyage in which Captain Cook charted the transit of Venus in 1769 and declared Australia a royal colony—is the greatest in history Plant adventure. Banksy paid ￡10,000, the equivalent of ￡600,000 today, to join himself and nine other people - a naturalist, a secretary, three artists and four servants - for the period. 3 years of global adventure. God knows how the rough-and-tumble Captain Cook got along with these docile, pampered people, but he seemed to like Banks and couldn't help admiring his botanical talents—feelings shared by his descendants.
No plant expedition team has achieved that much, not before or since. This was partly because the voyage colonized many new and obscure places - Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea - but mainly because Banks was a keen and a gifted collector. Even though he was unable to land in Rio de Janeiro due to quarantine regulations, he made a new discovery by sneaking a bag of feed for the animals on board. Nothing seemed to escape his gaze. In total, he brought back 30,000 plant specimens, including 1,400 that had never been seen before - adding about a quarter to the total number of known plants in the world.
But in an era when the thirst for knowledge reaches an almost absurd level, Banks's huge gains are only part of the total gain. Collecting plants became an international craze in the 18th century. Honor and riches await those who can discover new species. Botanists and adventurers have gone to incredible lengths to satisfy the world's thirst for novel plants. Thomas Nuttall, the man who named the wisteria after Casper Wistar, came to America as an uneducated printer but found himself interested in plants, hiking back and forth Hundreds of previously unseen plants were collected from half of the United States. John Frazier - for whom the Flemish fir tree is named - spent several years in the wilderness collecting specimens for Catherine the Great, only to discover that Russia had a new tsar. The new Tsar thought Fraser was crazy and refused to honor his contract.
Fraser took everything back to Chelsea, where he set up a nursery and sold azaleas, magnolias, Virginia creepers, asters, and other exotic flowers and plants from the colonies to the English gentry, much to their delight. I also made a lot of money.
As long as you make the right discovery, you can make a lot of money. Amateur botanist John Lyon spent two grueling and dangerous years collecting specimens and was rewarded with the equivalent of today's ￡125,000. However, many people who do this do so purely out of a love of botany. Nuttall donated most of the specimens he found to Liverpool Botanic Gardens. Eventually, he became director of the Harvard Botanical Garden and author of the encyclopedic Flora of North America (a book he not only wrote but also typed to a large extent).
That's just the plant part. And all the fauna of the New World—kangaroos, snipe owls, raccoons, red cats, mosquitoes, and other unimaginable wonders. The amount of life on earth seems endless, as Jonathan Swift noted in a famous poem:
So, the naturalist notices, a flea,
Prey on smaller fleas;
Smaller fleas also have smaller fleas to bite.
Who knows where the end is.
All this new information needs to be documented, organized, and compared with what is already known. The world desperately needs a workable classification system. Fortunately, there is someone in Sweden who is ready.
His name was Carl Linnaeus (later changed to the more aristocratic von Linnaeus with permission), but today he is only remembered by his Latinized name, Carolus Linnaeus. He was born in the village of La Schulte in southern Sweden, his father was a poor and ambitious Lutheran assistant pastor. He was academically lazy, so his father, angry and annoyed, sent him (according to some accounts, almost sent him) to be apprenticed to a cobbler. Kobayashi shuddered at the thought of hammering nails into skin for the rest of his life, begging to be given another chance. His request was met. Since then, he has always insisted on making academic achievements. He studied medicine in Sweden and the Netherlands, although he gradually developed an interest in nature. In the 1830s, he began cataloging the world's plant and animal species, using a system he developed. His fame gradually spread.
Few people treat their fame as calmly as he does. He spent much of his spare time painting and beautifying his portrait, claiming that there had never been "a greater botanist or zoologist" and that his system of classification was "the greatest achievement in science." He also modestly proposed that his tombstone should be written with the epitaph "Prince of Plants". It would be unwise to question his lauded self-assessment. Those who do this often find their names used for weeds.
Another distinctive feature of Linnaeus was his persistent—sometimes even fanatical—interest in sex. He was particularly impressed by the resemblance between certain bivalves and the female vulva. He named parts of one clam "vulva," "labia," "pubic hair," "anus," and "hymen." He classified plants according to their reproductive organs and described them as capable of lovemaking like humans. In describing flowers and their behavior, he frequently refers to "promiscuity," "sterile mistresses," and "the bridal bed." By spring, he wrote in an oft-quoted passage:
Love even comes among plants. Men and women...hold weddings...using their sexual organs to show who is male and who is female. The leaves of the flowers are used as the wedding bed. The Creator of all these has made excellent arrangements. He has hung such elegant bed curtains and sprinkled them with various elegant perfumes. The groom and his bride can be more solemn there. celebrate the wedding. Once the bed is thus prepared, it is time for the groom to embrace the bride and surrender himself to her.
He named a plant "clitoris" (the genus Butterfly pea). It's no wonder that many people think he's eccentric. However, his classification system is extremely charming.
Before Linnaeus, plants were overly named and overly descriptive. The plant world is a complete mess because of the different names. One botanist wondered whether Rosasylvestris albatunrubore and folioglabro were the same plant that other botanists called Rosasylvestrisinodoraseucanina. Linnaeus simply called it Rosacanina (thorny rose), thus solving this problem. This drastic shortening of plant names makes them useful and acceptable to everyone. This requires not only decisiveness but also an instinct—a genius, in fact, for spotting the salient features of a species.
The status of the Linnaean classification system has been firmly established, and it is difficult to imagine that another system could take its place. Before Linnaeus, the classification system was extremely arbitrary. Animals can be classified according to criteria: wild or domestic, terrestrial or aquatic, large or small, or even whether they are considered beautiful and noble or insignificant. Buffon classified animals according to their usefulness to humans, with little regard to anatomical characteristics. Linnaeus classified them according to their physiological characteristics and made correcting the above shortcomings his life's work. Taxonomy—the science of classification—never went back.
Of course all this takes time. The first edition of his masterpiece System of Nature in 1735 was only 14 pages. But it kept getting longer and longer, and by the 12th edition—the last edition Linnaeus lived to see—it had expanded to three volumes and 2,300 pages. Eventually, he named or recorded approximately 13,000 species of plants and animals. Other works have even wider coverage - John Ray's three-volume "General History of Plants" in England, completed a generation ago, included no less than 18,625 species of plants alone - but Linnaeus has something that no one can match. Place: Coherent, orderly, concise, timely. Although his works had been published as early as the 1730s, they did not become famous in England until the 1760s, making Linnaeus an old-fashioned figure in the eyes of British naturalists. Nowhere else was his system adopted with such enthusiasm (which is one reason why the Linnaean Society was based in London rather than in Stockholm).
Linnaeus was not perfect. His works collected descriptions of monsters and "eccentrics", gullible sailors and other imaginative travelers. Among them is a kind of savage who walks on all fours and has not yet mastered the art of language. He is "a kind of human being with a tail." However, we should not forget that this was a time when it was easy to be deceived. At the end of the 18th century, there were successive rumors that some people saw mermaids on the coast of Scotland. Even the great man Joseph Banks was very interested in this and believed it very much. On the whole, however, Linnaeus's errors were outweighed by his sound and often wise method of classification. He had many other achievements. Among them, he believed that whales, cattle, rats and other common land animals belonged to the same order of quadrupedal mammals (later renamed mammals). This has never been done before.
At the beginning, Linnaeus planned to record each plant with a genus name and a number - such as bindweed No. 1, bindweed No. 2, etc., but soon found that this method was not very practical. Satisfied, I then came up with a way to classify them by double names. To this day, binomial classification remains at the heart of the system. He intended to use the binomial system for everything in nature, such as rocks, minerals, diseases, winds, and so on. However, not everyone enthusiastically favors that system. Many are disturbed by the often vulgar nature of the system. This is somewhat ironic, since before Linnaeus, many common names for plants and animals were also vulgar. Dandelions are believed to have diuretic properties and have long been known as "urinals." Other common names include mare's fart, naked lady, throbbing testicles, hound's piss, bare butt, and toilet napkin. One or two of these vulgar names may have remained in English unintentionally. For example, the "maiden's hair" in Maiden's Hair Moss (i.e. Maiden's Hair Moss) does not refer to the hair on a girl's head.
In short, it has long been felt that some names in the natural sciences should be renamed in a traditional way to make them more serious. They were therefore a little displeased to discover that the self-proclaimed Prince of Plants had peppered his works with names such as Clitoris, Gynecomastia, and Vulva.
In the ensuing years, many of these names fell into disuse (though not all: the common clam is still formally known as the genus Cyperus) in order to satisfy the needs of natural science. The need for increasing specialization introduced many other elegant names. In particular, that system gradually adopted a number of hierarchical names as its basic structure. Naturalists had been using "genus" and "species" for more than 100 years before Linnaeus; in the 1850s and 1860s, "order", "class" and "family" in the biological sense began to be used; and "Door" was only coined in 1876 (by the German Haeckel); until the beginning of the 20th century, "family" and "order" were considered interchangeable. Where botanists use "order", zoologists once used "family", sometimes almost confusing everyone.
Linnaeus once divided the animal kingdom into six categories: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects and worms. Anything that cannot be placed in the first five categories is placed in the third. Category six. It was obvious from the beginning that placing both lobsters and shrimps in the worm class was unsatisfactory, so many new classes were created, such as molluscs and crustaceans. Unfortunately, this new classification is used inconsistently across countries. In order to reunify the pace, the British announced a new set of rules in 1842 called Strickland's Laws. However, the French regarded this as arbitrary, and the Zoological Society immediately fought back and proposed its own corresponding rules. The law of contradiction. At the same time, the American Ornithological Society decided to use the 1758 version of the "System of Nature" rather than the 1766 version used elsewhere as the basis for all nomenclature, for unknown reasons. This means that, in the 19th century, many American birds were placed in different genera than their European brethren. It was not until 1902, at a meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, that naturalists finally began to show a spirit of compromise and adopt unified laws.
Taxonomy is sometimes described as a science and sometimes as an art, but in fact it is a battlefield. Even today, that system is more chaotic than many people realize. Take the division of phyla that describes the basic cross-section of organisms as an example. There are several phyla that everyone is familiar with, such as molluscs (including clams and snails), arthropods (including insects and beetles), and chordates (including us and all animals). animals with backbones or primitive backbones); beyond that, the situation quickly becomes increasingly murkier. Among the nebulous phyla, we might name the Gnillogastrophyta (marine worms), Cnidaria (jellyfish, polyps, and corals), and Acanthophyta (or tiny "penis worms"). Whether you are familiar with it or not, these are the basic categories. Surprisingly, however, people have very different opinions on how many doors there are or should be. Many biologists insist that the total number is about 30 phyla, but some believe that 20 or so phyla are more appropriate, and Edward O. Wilson's book "The Diversity of Life" puts the number as high as an astonishing 89 phyla. . It depends on your stance on classification - what people in biology call it, it depends on whether you are a "converging taxonomist" or a "separating taxonomist."
On a more mundane level, species are more likely to be called different things. Whether a goat-weed species should be called Aegilopsincurva, Aegilopsincurvata, or Aegilopsovata may not be a big question that won't arouse the enthusiasm of many non-botanists, but it can spark very heated debate among those concerned. The problem is that there are a total of 5,000 species of grass in the world, and many of them look very similar even to people who know grass. As a result, several species have been discovered and named at least 20 times, and there seems to be almost no grass that has not been independently discovered at least twice.
The two-volume "American Grass Chronicle" devotes 200 dense pages to clearing out all the synonyms, which are repeated names that are often used carelessly in the botanical community. That only involves grass species in one country.
To resolve the differences that exist around the world, an organization called the International Society of Plant Taxonomy adjudicates issues of order and duplication. It issued decrees from time to time, declaring that California fuchsia (a common rockery garden plant) would henceforth be called sedge; and that tuftweed could now be considered silkweed instead of pseudosilkweed. The same species of leaf grass. Under normal circumstances, these are small problems that are grouped together and don't attract much attention. But if they occasionally offend beloved garden plants, screams of outrage are inevitable. In the late 1980s, the common chrysanthemum was (on superficially sound principles) expelled from its eponymous genus and relegated to the less interesting genus Chrysanthemum.
The people who grow chrysanthemums are a group of people with strong self-esteem, and there are many of them. They protested to the Seed Plants Committee. This committee sounds awkward, but it actually exists. (Others include the Pteridophytes, Bryophytes, and Fungi Committees, all reporting to an executive called the "General Rapporteur;" such institutions are truly to be cherished.) Although some rules regarding nomenclature should be strictly adhered to, Botanists were not indifferent to sentiment and reversed that decision in 1995. Due to similar circumstances, Petunia, Euonymus, and a common Amaryllis species were spared a downgraded fate. However, many species of Geranium were not included, and a few years ago, those plants were transferred to the genus Geranium amid outcry. These debates are interestingly described in Charles Elliott's Potting Shed Documents.
The same quarrels, the same reclassifications, occur in all other realms of life, so coming up with a total is not as easy as you might think. As a result, we have no idea how many things actually live on our planet—"not even a close approximation," in Edward O. Wilson's words. This is a very surprising fact. It is estimated that this number ranges from 3 million to 200 million. What’s even more incredible is that according to a report in The Economist magazine, as many as 97 plant and animal species in the world have yet to be discovered.
Among the known biological species, more than 99 out of 100 species have only a simple description - "a scientific name, a few samples in the museum, and scattered descriptions in scientific magazines." Wilson is This describes the state of our knowledge. In The Diversity of Life, he estimated the number of known species—plants, insects, microbes, algae, everything—at 1.4 million, but went on to say that was just a guess. Other authorities put the number of known species at slightly higher, ranging from 1.5 million to 1.8 million, but there is no centralized record of these things, so there is no way to check the numbers. In short, we don't actually know what we actually know. This is the incredible state we are in right now.
In principle, we can go to experts in each specialized field, ask them how many species there are in their field, and then add them up to get a total. Many people actually did that. The problem is that the totals derived from any two rarely match. Some concluded that there are 70,000 known species of fungi, while others concluded that there are 100,000 species—a difference of nearly 50%. You can find confident assertions that 4,000 species of earthworms have been described, and equally confident assertions that 12,000 species have been described. As far as insects are concerned, the number ranges from 750,000 to 950,000 species. You know, these are speculative numbers of known species. As for plants, the accepted number is between 248,000 and 265,000 species. This error may not seem very large, but it is more than 20 times the number of flowering plants in North America.
It is not easy to keep things organized. In the early 1960s, Colin Groves of the Australian National University began a systematic study of more than 250 known primates.
It turns out that the same animal is often described more than twice—sometimes seven times—without the discoverer knowing that the animal he was studying was already known to science. It took Groves 40 years to sort it all out. It was a relatively small group of animals, easy to distinguish, and generally uncontroversial. If someone tried to do something similar with the planet's roughly 20,000 species of lichens, more than 50,000 species of molluscs, or more than 400,000 species of beetles, who knows what would happen.
One thing is certain, there is a vast amount of life in the world, although the actual number can only be estimated based on extrapolation - sometimes wild extrapolation. In a famous experiment in the 1980s, Terry Irving of the Smithsonian Institution sprayed 19 trees in the Panamanian rainforest with insecticide and then picked up everything that fell from the trees into his net. Among his catches (actually several catches, since he repeated the experiment seasonally to make sure he caught migrating species) were 1,200 species of beetles. Based on variables such as the distribution of beetles elsewhere, the number of other tree species in the forest, the number of forests in the world, the number of other insect species, etc., he estimated that the entire