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That great beast of a town: in the 1770s, London became the epicenter for a great intellectual quest: discovering the incredible diversity of life on Earth

Natural History, March, 2008 by Richard Conniff

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In November 1774, a cask of rum arrived in London spiked with four dead electric eels, the largest of them three feet eight inches long and up to fourteen inches around. They had smooth, snaky bodies, flattened heads, blunt snouts with a pronounced underbite, and two small fins, resembling ears, at the sides. Their eyes were small and round, and their dark facial skin was heavily pockmarked, as if by the point of a knitting needle.

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The eels, actually knifefish of the species Electrophorus electricus, had been sent from the Suriname River ill South America, and the sensation they caused in England was literally electric. A fifth eel had survived aboard ship all the way to the port of Falmouth, in southwestern England, and had duly delivered electric shocks to British thrill seekers before finally expiring. But even dead and consigned to rum, a standard preservative then, the specimens still had the power to excite educated minds.

John Hunter, master dissector (and avid client of grave robbers), surgeon extraordinary to King George III, and father of modern surgery, "danced a jig when he saw. them, they are so compleat and well preserved," wrote his equally eminent naturalist friend Daniel Solander. John Walsh, a member of parliament and amateur scientist who had gotten rich in the East India Company, promptly paid sixty guineas for the three best-preserved eels--roughly two years' wages for the average London laborer then. Solander wrote to Joseph Banks, the botanist and naturalist, urging him to hurry to town, because Walsh and Hunter were sharpening their scalpels, "bent upon ... opening one at least at the beginning of next week."

That those prize specimens should have found their way to London and elicited such delight there was unsurprising. Indeed, it was entirely within the means of the city's scientific circles to command the collection of additional electric eels from South America the following year--this time delivered live to Walsh's residence on Chesterfield Street, where an eel soon repeatedly demonstrated its ability to send a 600-volt charge through the joined hands of a ring of dozens of people at a time. No one seems to have suffered ill effects at these odd gatherings, though it is now known that even lower voltages can be fatal. Instead, visitors came away with a heightened sense of that era's characteristic excitement about the limitless possibilities of the natural world.

Science and giddy spectacle seemed to be everywhere in London, whose raucous population of 700,000 was crammed into seven square miles at a bend of the Thames River. The Thames itself was thick with the masts of ships serving a global empire, making London the place where the modern world of commerce, industry, urban living, and international trade was taking shape. Partly as a result, the city was also the nursing ground, if not the birthplace, for the science of natural history. Carolus Linnaeus had gotten things started by publishing and popularizing the first modern system for classifying species, beginning in 1735. But Linnaeus lived in the backwater of Uppsala, Sweden, a university town of just a few thousand people. Naturalists in Paris, Amsterdam, and other cities had also taken up the Linnaean cause. But London was the second biggest city in the world (soon to overtake Beijing) and the British passion for natural history soon made it the center of one of the greatest intellectual quests in human history: the discovery of the incredible variety of life on Earth.

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AT THE START OF THE eighteenth century, the study of plants and animals had been an obsession of what Alexander Pope called the "virtuoso class," virtuosos being wealthy amateur naturalists vying to add the latest shell or skeleton to their private collections. But by midcentury, the rage for natural history had spread to the rest of the populace, becoming what cultural historian G. S. Rousseau has called "the universal British pastime, if not the national sport."

Then as now, naturalists came in for ridicule. The essayist Joseph Addison mocked them for hoarding up the "Refuse of Nature ... such Creatures as others industriously avoid the Sight of." The critic and wit Samuel Johnson depicted a fictitious landowner named Quisquilius whose zeal for collecting was such that he let his tenants pay their rent in butterflies and three species of earth-worms not known to the naturalists." But much as he disdained the menial labor of collecting specimens, even Dr. Johnson conceded that "there is nothing more worthy of admiration to a philosophical eye than the structure of animals."

The British people plainly agreed. Up to a thousand visitors a day came to ogle the vast natural history collection at the home of a virtuoso named Ashton Lever in Manchester. Charging admission would have been beneath his dignity, so Lever, clearly overwhelmed, attempted to discourage the carriageless lower classes by refusing Entry to anyone arriving on foot. One spurned but determined visitor returned riding a cow. He was duly admitted.

That great beast of a town: in the 1770s, London became the epicenter for a great intellectual quest: discovering the incredible diversity of life on Earth

Natural History, March, 2008 by Richard Conniff

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