Read Online Dry Storeroom No. 1 by Richard Fortey - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Richard Fortey
Ads: Link
a world whose biodiversity is threatened, I should perhaps explain the nuts and bolts of naming animals and plants. Readers who are gardeners or ornithologists will be accustomed to calling their plants or birds by scientific names. These names provide a common language for all biologists around the world, because they are the official name, the agreed nomenclature. If the name
Larus ridibundus
is used by a Japanese, an American or even an inhabitant of the Philippines, it is the same bird species that is being identified, regardless of the local name; “black-headed gull” just happens to be our British local name for this particular bird, but few Englishmen would know what the Japanese might call it. Different gull species would be just as precisely specified by their scientific names:
Larus argentatus
(our herring gull),
Larus atricilla
(laughing gull to an Australian) and so on. Plants can have many different vernacular names for the same species, even within the same country. In his magisterial
Flora Britannica
Richard Mabey tells us that Cow Parsley is known as Queen Anne’s lace, kex, kecksie, mummy die, grandpa’s pepper, badman’s oatmeal, blackman’s tobacco and rabbit meat.
Anthriscus sylvestris
may lack the charm of these local names, but it means the same to all interlocutors, regardless of their origin. The scientific name for a species has to be a unique two words, or binomial, so it differs from human names in this respect, where there is no limit to the number of John Smiths. The name has two parts: first, the genus (or generic) name, which is invariably capitalized; the second, the species (or specific) name, which is never capitalized even if it is obviously named after a person—as in
johnsmithi.
The latter is a convention, as is the italicization of the scientific name, which readily allows recognition of a scientific appellation in a sheet of printed text. When the same generic name appears in a list, it is customary to abbreviate it to the initial letter, as, for example, in remarking that a collection of birds’ eggs included examples of those of
Larus ridibundus, L. atricilla
and
L. argentatus.
If no two animals may have the same scientific name, neither may any two plants. I do not believe it is against the rules to use the same name for a plant and an animal, since there is little chance of confusing an ant with a liana. I have toyed with the idea of naming a trilobite
Chrysanthemum
just to be mischievous. A unit of classification is a taxon (the plural is taxa), and that is why the business of naming them is taxonomy. Scientific names have a long tradition of taking Latin or Greek form. This goes back to the days when scientific communication was in Latin, as the language understood by the intellectual classes across Europe. In the early eighteenth century descriptions and names of plants and animals were often rather unwieldy slabs of Latin. The present simple system of naming and classifying animals and plants was developed in the eighteenth century by the Swede Carl von Linné, who is himself nearly always latinized to Linnaeus: he it was who showed the utility of the binomial to characterize the species of the living world.
Linnaeus’ tercentenary was in 2007. As part of the celebrations I was asked to reply to a speech given at the Linnean Society of London by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Akihito of Japan. Thanks to Linnaeus, His Majesty was able to talk to his fellow ichthyologists about his favorite organisms, small fishes called gobies. I was told that the trees in the Imperial Garden are labelled with their scientific names. We all understood one another, and everyone smiled. Linnaeus worked in his maturity in the charming and ancient city of Uppsala; his system triumphed because of its utility and comprehensiveness. He developed his ideas in plant classification as a young man during travels to Lappland—then a daring undertaking. A quirky portrait of him dressed in Lappish
Larus ridibundus
is used by a Japanese, an American or even an inhabitant of the Philippines, it is the same bird species that is being identified, regardless of the local name; “black-headed gull” just happens to be our British local name for this particular bird, but few Englishmen would know what the Japanese might call it. Different gull species would be just as precisely specified by their scientific names:
Larus argentatus
(our herring gull),
Larus atricilla
(laughing gull to an Australian) and so on. Plants can have many different vernacular names for the same species, even within the same country. In his magisterial
Flora Britannica
Richard Mabey tells us that Cow Parsley is known as Queen Anne’s lace, kex, kecksie, mummy die, grandpa’s pepper, badman’s oatmeal, blackman’s tobacco and rabbit meat.
Anthriscus sylvestris
may lack the charm of these local names, but it means the same to all interlocutors, regardless of their origin. The scientific name for a species has to be a unique two words, or binomial, so it differs from human names in this respect, where there is no limit to the number of John Smiths. The name has two parts: first, the genus (or generic) name, which is invariably capitalized; the second, the species (or specific) name, which is never capitalized even if it is obviously named after a person—as in
johnsmithi.
The latter is a convention, as is the italicization of the scientific name, which readily allows recognition of a scientific appellation in a sheet of printed text. When the same generic name appears in a list, it is customary to abbreviate it to the initial letter, as, for example, in remarking that a collection of birds’ eggs included examples of those of
Larus ridibundus, L. atricilla
and
L. argentatus.
If no two animals may have the same scientific name, neither may any two plants. I do not believe it is against the rules to use the same name for a plant and an animal, since there is little chance of confusing an ant with a liana. I have toyed with the idea of naming a trilobite
Chrysanthemum
just to be mischievous. A unit of classification is a taxon (the plural is taxa), and that is why the business of naming them is taxonomy. Scientific names have a long tradition of taking Latin or Greek form. This goes back to the days when scientific communication was in Latin, as the language understood by the intellectual classes across Europe. In the early eighteenth century descriptions and names of plants and animals were often rather unwieldy slabs of Latin. The present simple system of naming and classifying animals and plants was developed in the eighteenth century by the Swede Carl von Linné, who is himself nearly always latinized to Linnaeus: he it was who showed the utility of the binomial to characterize the species of the living world.
Linnaeus’ tercentenary was in 2007. As part of the celebrations I was asked to reply to a speech given at the Linnean Society of London by His Imperial Majesty Emperor Akihito of Japan. Thanks to Linnaeus, His Majesty was able to talk to his fellow ichthyologists about his favorite organisms, small fishes called gobies. I was told that the trees in the Imperial Garden are labelled with their scientific names. We all understood one another, and everyone smiled. Linnaeus worked in his maturity in the charming and ancient city of Uppsala; his system triumphed because of its utility and comprehensiveness. He developed his ideas in plant classification as a young man during travels to Lappland—then a daring undertaking. A quirky portrait of him dressed in Lappish
Similar Books
