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

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.

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.

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WHY THIS SUDDEN outburst of passion for the natural world? For more than a thousand years, nature had been locked away behind moral lessons and mythology. The Church, devoted to knowing the mind of God, had turned its back on nature. Common knowledge even about native European plants and animals had been handed down uncritically for centuries from Roman authors and medieval bestiaries full of imaginary creatures. So when the scientific revolution finally provided release from the fixed, allegorical medieval cosmos, people began to see nature as if for the first time.

In England, the natural philosopher Isaac Newton had devised a new way of looking at the world in terms of astronomy, mathematics, and physics. The philosopher Francis Bacon had popularized the idea that knowing the Creation was the way to know God and to recover the intimate dominion over Nature lost at the gate of the Garden of Eden. A 1765 letter to London from Dr. Alexander Garden, a South Carolina naturalist, suggests that, after a century's gestation, this idea was now in full blossom. An ardent disciple of Linnaeus, Garden first griped about a rival stealing a species that he himself had actually discovered. But then he relented: "Yet, after all, he is an excellent man and I forgive him, because it is a matter of little moment who declares the glories of God, provided only they are not passed over in silence."

Some tradition-bound geographers still populated blank regions on their maps with such imaginary monsters as manticores (a blend of lion, scorpion, and human) and blemmies (headless humans whose faces were incorporated in their chests). But travelers were now actually visiting the farthest corners of the planet and discovering what really lived there. Linnaeus had provided the tools for bringing order to the overwhelming diversity they encountered. His system of classification made it possible to take any living thing, give it a simple name (like Homo sapiens), and place it in a neat hierarchy by species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom.

While not everyone could understand Newtonian physics, anyone could now approach the natural world, and for a time, according to the historian of science John R.R. Christie, almost everyone did--men and women, clergy and merchants, aristocrats and gardeners' boys. Studying nature required explorers willing to face the likelihood of death in some unknown land and also homebodies who could sit still and record minute details of natural behavior. It called for practical types skilled at hunting, drying, and stuffing, and also philosophical sorts who could make subtle distinctions about what connected different animals and what separated them. The new discipline required scholars trained to use the complex vocabulary of scientific description to name, classify, and describe the natural world. But it also required artists and writers who could bring new species to life for ordinary readers.

THROUGHOUT THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, astonishing creatures from distant regions seemed to turn up in London almost daily--the first zebra, the first giraffe, the first moose--each adding fuel to the raging national passion for the wonders of the natural world. In 1771, Banks and Solander themselves had brought back thousands of plant and animal specimens after three years traveling around the world with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour. Among their prizes were the skin and skull of a large creature with a head like a deer, said to rise up on two legs. It was also said to use those legs to go bounding across the grasslands of Australia like a hare, but with its long, heavy tail serving for balance. Banks announced it to the outside world with a borrowed Aboriginal name: "Kanguru."

New species arrived in London not just in the cause of science, but as entertainment. For a penny or two, gawkers could see a rhinoceros, a yak, a baboon, or a macaque monkey. Commercial menageries seemed to be everywhere, and taverns and coffeehouses attracted customers with "the living alligator or crocodile, lately arrived from the coast of Guinea," or "an Eel, the largest ever seen in London." It's hard now to imagine all of those creatures thrashing around the middle of eighteenth-century London. The human population density then already exceeded that of modern Manhattan--but without high-rise buildings, sewerage systems, or other means of making cities livable. Cartmen and porters pushed through the packed streets, one writer complained, and generally yelled "Make Room there!" or "By your leave!" after having just knocked you to the ground. And yet a 1773 visitor could remark, with some exaggeration, "Wild Beasts on every Street in Town."

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Tame ones, too: A monkey (improbably identified as a "little Marmazet from Bengal") performed the Cheshire Rounds, a popular country dance. A hare played the tabor, a kind of snare drum, according to Richard Altick's history The Shows of London. So-called "Breslaw's birds," of unknown species, arranged themselves in ranks and marched liked British soldiers, with miniature grenadiers' caps on their heads and wooden muskets tucked under their wings. The baiting of bears and bulls was a common amusement, and in one popular event, the so-called Welsh main, only one fighting cock survived from among thirty-two combatants. The naturalist Gilbert White, savoring the relatively unmolested wildlife around his rural vicarage in Selborne, disparaged London as "that great beast of a town."

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Private collections also catered to the ravenous British appetite for "prodigies," as wonders of the natural world were known then. In 1775, Ashton Lever, the virtuoso whose house in Manchester had been overrun with visitors, moved his collection to London, into twelve rooms of a former royal palace in Leicester Square [see illustration opposite page]. This time, dignity be damned, he charged admission. The collection featured preserved specimens, in no particular order, of squirrel monkey, coatimundi, opossum, leopard, osprey, bird of paradise, flamingo, sawfish, arctic fox, and thousands of other species. There was also "a Duck with a foot growing out of its head," a monkey in the pose of the Venus de' Medici, and a pair of hummingbirds displayed beside an ostrich, "by way of contrast."

Lever called his museum Holophusicon, "all of nature," and, like Dr. Johnson's Quisquilius, he nearly bankrupted himself in his quest "to possess all nature's wonders." But in the presence of his specimens, he and his public alike seemed to experience something sublime, what one visitor later called "a majestic awe for the power of bones and claws."

Strictly scientific collectors were less impressed. The botanist Joseph Banks apparently despised Lever, perhaps because the virtuoso's higgledy-piggledy displays blatantly flouted the beautiful order the Linnaean system of classification was just bringing to the natural world. Banks may also have resented Lever's knack for beating him to choice specimens. The Holophusicon's natural history collections were superior in variety, if not in scientific usefulness, to those of the British Museum itself. Or as Lever himself immodestly put it, "I am at this Time, SOLE POSSESSOR OF THE FIRST MUSEUM IN THE UNIVERSE."

But if the showmen were colorful bordering on bizarre, so at times were the naturalists. And they sometimes depended intimately on the showmen for their best specimens. One night, for instance, George Stubbs, the master animal painter and anatomist, got word that there was a dead tiger at a traveling menagerie. "His coat was hurried on, and he flew towards the well-known place," a friend later wrote, "and presently entered the den where the dead animal lay extended: this was a precious moment." For three guineas, the carcass was delivered to Stubbs's home, where the artist spent the rest of the night (and probably many weeks thereafter) preparing and dissecting it. Well before human embalming was commonplace, Stubbs was a master at injecting a carcass with wax and other preservatives.

As a young man, he'd spent eighteen months meticulously stripping horse carcasses down to the skeleton and making detailed drawings at every anatomical level along the way, including five separate layers of muscle. According to a friend, his method was to suspend, from the ceiling, an iron bar lined with stout hooks, which he fastened between the ribs and under the backbone on the far side of the carcass. Then he lifted the animal up, with a platform under its feet, and began peeling back the skin and methodically working his way inward, spending six or seven weeks on each specimen. The result, apart from some of the greatest animal paintings and drawings the world has ever known, was a dawning sense of all the common elements connecting humans to other animals. Late in life, Stubbs made a drawing of a tiger skeleton running, and paired it with a drawing of a human skeleton hunched over like a sprinter leaving the blocks. The one echoed the other almost bone for bone. The quest for the glories of God was already leading some naturalists to think more carefully about the presumed glory of mankind.

Scientific research was also moving in the direction of comparative anatomy. John Hunter, London's leading surgeon and the likely model for the animal-loving Dr. Dolittle, and perhaps also for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, dissected about 500 species over the course of his career, always with an eye to where each one fit in the larger biological picture. His method was to focus on some anatomical feature and present dissections from a variety of species side by side, in an orderly series of glass jars. For instance, his nervous system series includes marine worm, medicinal leech (still an important model in neurological research), earthworm, sea mouse, centipede, scorpion, lobster, slug, cuttlefish, sheep, ox, ass, porpoise, minke whale, and finally a human brain.

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What Hunter learned in animals he soon applied to human patients. Among many other contributions to modern science, he demonstrated for the first time how bones grow, how the testicles descend in the fetus, and what course the olfactory nerves travel.

THE IDEA THAT NATURAL HISTORY might be an obscure or even irrelevant discipline, like collecting postage stamps, would have struck almost everyone in late-eighteenth-century London as utterly alien. Every species was astonishing in its way, and the naturalists who discovered, identified, labeled, and studied them were doing what Linnaeus called "immortal work."

That was true even with obscure species like the electric eel. By 1774 the London community of gentlemen scientists had an extensive network, bordering on espionage, in the most remote corners of the Earth. So they knew well in advance that the electric eels were coming. All five of the eels had been alive early that summer, when an enterprising British mariner carried them to Charlestown, South Carolina, and put them on display. Alexander Garden, the doctor and disciple of Linnaeus, had spied the eels. He promptly wrote to John Ellis, a London linen merchant and naturalist, who maintained an extensive correspondence with collectors in the American colonies. "The person to whom these animals belong, calls them Electrical Fish;" Garden reported, "and indeed the power they have of giving an electrical shock ... is their most singular and astonishing property."

Garden naturally tried to buy them. And when the asking price proved too high, he sized up the likelihood of all five surviving the transatlantic voyage. (As an air-breather, E. electricus can live for months in a barrel of oxygen-depleted water, though not happily.) Then he advised the mariner "to get a small cask of rum, with a large bung, into which he may put any of them that may die, and so preserve them for the inspection and examination of the curious when he arrives."

The eels were thus perfectly prepared for London, and London for them. John Walsh and John Hunter had already done careful work on European torpedo fish, which can deliver a comparatively mild electrical shock of about fifty volts. Encouraged by that noted authority on electricity, Benjamin Franklin, Walsh and Hunter had determined that the electrical organs made up half the fish (and tasted like insipid mucilage"). Hunter had characteristically taken note of the extensive network of nerves running through the electrical organs, and in an offhand phrase about the potential significance of bioelectricity, anticipated much of the future development of neurophysiology. "How far this may, be connected with the power of the nerves in general," he wrote, "or how far it may lead to an explanation of their operations ... future discoveries alone can fully determine."

Not everyone was ready to accept the idea of an animal producing electricity. So Walsh pasted tinfoil on a strip of glass and cut a narrow gap in the foil with the blade of a sharp knife. The idea was to get the electricity from the eels to visibly leap this gap. Soon after, a leading scientific journal reported, "It is with great pleasure that I inform you that they have given me an electric spark."

That spark was the beginning of the science of bioelectricity. A few years later, probably inspired by Walsh's work, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani began his celebrated research demonstrating the electrical nature of neural activity in ordinary animals, using an electrical stimulus to induce a muscle movement in a frog's leg. Soon after, working from animal models, the physicist Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery. In the new century, other researchers would go on to develop the science of neurophysiology, and to demonstrate the electrical basis of neural activity in the human brain.

Discovering new species wasn't anything like collecting postage stamps. On the contrary, the gifted community of naturalists gathered in London in the late eighteenth century lived and breathed with a knowledge we would do well to recapture even now. For them, each new species held the dazzling potential to reveal the secrets of life itself.

Richard Conniff, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow; is at work on a book about the discovery of species. His award-winning articles have appeared in Time, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. Conniff is the author of six books, including The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide (Norton, 2002) and Spineless Wonders: Strange Tales of the Invertebrate World (Holt, 1996).

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