BOOKSHELF BY LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL 



Dry Storeroc 

 No. 1 



The Secret Life of the 

 History Museum 



by Richard Fortey 

 Alfred A. Knopf, 2008; 5 



Whether or not you have ever visited 

 the Natural History Museum in 

 London, this tell-all by a longtime 

 senior paleontologist is a highly en- 

 tertaining way to learn what makes 

 Dry Storeroom No. 1 — and the entire 

 museum — so special. As in virtually 

 all museums of international stature, 

 most of the archives, storerooms, and 

 laboratories in the London museum 

 complex are off-limits to the public. 

 The main work of the institution hap- 

 pens away from the exhibit galleries, 

 behind locked doors, where squadrons 

 of specialists tend a vast warehouse 

 of animal, vegetable, and mineral 

 specimens numbering, by current es- 

 timates, about 80 million objects. 



Richard Fortey, who has been 

 at the museum since 1970, rambles 

 around its network of corridors 

 and cubbyholes like an enthusiastic 

 docent. The Natural History Mu- 

 seum, you quickly learn, is not just a 

 haphazard assemblage of curiosities, 

 but a sort of international bureau of 

 standards, the repository of the ex- 

 emplary specimens that scientists use 

 to impart order to the diversity of na- 

 ture. There are file cabinets crammed 

 with pressed leaves and flowers, ranks 

 upon ranks ot drawers holding neatly 

 pinned beetles, and cupboards filled 

 with jars holding fish, newts, frogs, 

 and jellyfish pickled in formalin or 

 alcohol. All are kept, not just because 

 someone fancied them, but because 

 scientists need to study them to find 

 out how apparent differences conceal 



underlying connections, and to dis- 

 cover how they fit into the history of 

 our planet. 



Even more fascinating than the 

 curious collection of animals, veg- 

 etables, and minerals, however, is 

 the museum's curious collection 

 of people, especially the curato- 

 rial staff, each of whom claims an 

 almost monomaniacal expertise in 

 one small area of the institution's 

 holdings. Fortey is an expert in tri- 

 lobites, for instance, and may know 

 more about those crablike fossils 

 than anyone else in the world. But 

 it appears that he knows at least as 

 much about the strange habits of the 

 inhabitants of the museum's turrets, 

 laboratories, and offices. 



Miriam Rothschild, for instance, 

 was the world authority on fleas, fol- 

 lowing in the footsteps of her father, 

 Charles, who donated his large col- 

 lection of the little creatures to the 

 museum in the 1920s. She labored 

 for two decades on the insects, pro- 

 ducing a five-volume illustrated cat- 

 alogue of fleas, while maintaining an 

 active public life as a conservationist. 

 As a member of one of the richest 

 families in Europe, she was known 

 to her colleagues as the "Queen 

 Bee," and came to work every day in 

 a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. 



At the other end of the spectrum 

 of legitimacy was Colonel Richard 

 Meinertzhagen, a sort of Indiana 

 Jones figure, whose autobiographical 

 accounts of his exploits as a soldier, 

 spy, and big-game hunter earned 

 him a minor public reputation. He 

 donated some 20,000 bird skins to 

 the museum in the 1950s, as well as a 

 collection of a half million lice. Not 

 until almost two decades after his 

 death was it discovered that many of 

 the bird specimens had been stolen 

 from various museums — including 

 the London museum itself ! 



Although the size and variety of 

 the museum's collection continue 

 to grow, Fortey recognizes that the 

 days of aristocratic collectors and ob- 



sessive catalogers may be numbered, 

 as computerized databases make it 

 less essential to house everything in 

 creation under one roof. But there's 

 little doubt that the Natural History 

 Museum will continue to be a mecca 

 for both tourists and scientists, and 

 that Fortey's lively book is a great 

 way to get to know it. 



A Supremely Bad 

 Idea 



Three Mad Birders and Their Quest 

 to See It All 



by Luke Dempsey 

 Bloomsbury, 2008; $24.99 



Reading this book took a bit Ion ger 

 than expected. Not because the 

 writing dragged — Luke Dempsey's 

 narrative, as witty and intelligent as 

 vintage Bill Bryson, moves along at a 

 brisk and sometimes breathless pace. 

 No, what slowed me down was that I 

 so frequently found myself setting the 

 book aside and reaching for a previ- 

 ously uncracked copy of the Smith- 

 sonian Field Guide to the Birds of North 

 America. My life list of bird sight- 

 ings, you see, consists of the Canada 

 goose, the pigeon, the crow, and the 

 robin — and I'm not too sure about 

 the robin. Dempsey, on the other 

 hand, really knows his birds and his 

 birding, which makes him something 

 of an avian name-dropper. So when 

 he exults over a crested caracara, a 

 Hudsonian godwit, or an elegant tro- 

 gon, I'm off to the Field Guide to see 

 what all the fuss is about. 



Yet when I arrived at the last 

 chapter, after many digressions, the 

 book seemed all too short. It's a 

 supposedly true story of three New 

 Yorkers — Dempsey and two friends, 

 Don and Donna Graffiti — who 

 spend lunch hours gawking at mi- 

 gratory birds in Central Park and 



56 



NATURAL HISTORY October 2008 



