A Taxonomist's Taxonomist

We taxonomists and natural historians are said to be the fuddy-duddies and accountants of science--maintainers of the lists and guardians of the storehouses. The haughty princes of more prestigious disciplines have often used this image to lord their status over us. The physicist Lord Rutherford, at the turn of the century, called us glorified stamp collectors. His equally exalted successor Luis Alvarez, angered that many dinosaur taxonomists had disputed his asteroidal impact theory of mass extinction, used the same image just three or four years ago: "I don't like to say bad things about paleontologists, but they're really not very good scientists. They're more like stamp collectors." (I happen to agree with Luis on the extinction issue, but I deplore his simile. I might also say that, as a former philatelist, I reject his disparagement from both sides.)

Three supposedly common elements fuel this persistent simile: (1) the need to "get 'em all," to fill all the spaces in the album, or check off all the bird species on your life list; (2) the obsession with measurement of trivial differences and the need to collect all versions (every variation in number of perforations--philatelists have "perforation gauges" for quick and accurate counting--or each nuance in number and shade of tail feathers or body scales; (3) order, order, order.

Stereotypes, cliches and canonical legends often arise from substrates of validity, whatever their simplistic exaggerations or unfair mockeries. Amidst the variety of natural historians, we do find a small genre of blitzkrieg collectors and hoarders who can turn a species or habitat into the equivalent of the martyred Vietnamese village described in the infamous words of an American military commander: "We had to destroy the town in order to save it." I study a West Indian land snail named Cerion. One of my predecessors, a manic collector who worked half a century ago, gathered Cerion by the tens of thousands (per site if available!). To this day his specimens remain in large burlap bags, never opened or studied, in drawers of the Smithsonian Institution. I cannot for the life of me fathom what he thought he might ever do with so many shells. The science of statistics is dedicated to the proposition that you really don't have to get them all.

In the true spirit of natural history--the cherishing of honorable diversity (both in objects and doers)--Rosamond Purcell and I present a fine collector who probably does come as close to the stereotype of "string not worth saving" as any taxonomists of note. Yet just as I once loved the triangular stamps of Tannu Tuva, ogled the reproduction of Goya's naked maja on a Spanish issue, admired the colors of San Marino's offerings to philatelists of the world (surely they were not meant for postage from this tiny principality), and tried to fill every Ceylonese space in my album--so too may we respect and appreciate the life and work of Willem Cornelis van Heurn (1887-1972).

Van Heurn's name will never loom large in the annals of science, for he spun no theories, invented no concepts, and coined no words. Among his hundred or so publications, the only item that even comes close to commenting on a conceptual issue in evolutionary theory appeared in 1955, under the charmingly anthropocentric title: "Do tits lay eggs together as the result of a housing shortage?" As I scan his list of writings, I note (in abundance) all the staples of the stereotype--the endless descriptions and odd observations of a gentle, harmless, diligent naturalist, ever out for a new tidbit, a previously unnoticed grain of sand on nature's beach. "Poaching in the service of ornithology" in 1921. "A Gecko with a forked tail" and "Cannibalism in frogs" in 1928. "Mortality of chicken broods during a thunderstorm" in 1957. "Wrinkled eggs" in 1958. "Extra premolars in the lower jaw of the mole" in 1959. "Our cat washes herself" in 1962. Consider the totality of van Heurn's output for 1927: "Some comments on the bats of Buitenzorg," "The rat question," "Shark and ray leather," "The safety instinct in chickens," "An observation of a cuckoo which, without evidence, would have been falsely interpreted," and, finally, the ultimate exhortation of the careful collector, "Good labelling."

Van Heurn, endowed with advantages of high birth and family wealth, studied biology at the University of Leiden and remained an associate and benefactor of the Natural History Museum, one of the world's oldest and best, throughout his life. The memorial booklet by L.B. Holthuis and A.M. Husson, published by the Museum after van Heurn's death, succinctly stated his qualifications for his genre of science: "He made natural history collections wherever he went and gave his attention to almost all animal groups. He was an excellent shot, and a competent preparator; his mammal and bird skins are exemplary."

Taking full advantage of the limited Dutch empire, van Heurn went to Surinam in 1911, to Simaloer (an island off the west cost of Sumatra) in 1913, and to Dutch New Guinea in 1920-21. He then lived in the Dutch East Indies (mostly on Java) for fifteen years before returning to Holland in 1939. While in the Indies, he ran a laboratory for sea research, studied rat control on Java, Timor, and Flores, taught high school, and eventually became head of the botany department at the Netherlands Indies Medical School in Java. Everywhere he lived and travelled, van Heurn collected large series of specimens. These he would prepare and label in his particularly meticulous way. Most of this material ended up in the Leiden museum, where van Heurn himself worked as an assistant curator for fossil mammals from 1941 to 1945, before moving to Wilp in the central Netherlands. Van Heurn continued his collecting at Wilp, concentrating (as ever) on local natural history--in this case, the moles underground and domestic animals in plainer sight.

Rosamond Purcell's photographs beautifully capture the spirit (both strength and foibles) of natural history in this style. Consider the sheer number gathered of the most ordinary creatures, with each skin lovingly prepared and arranged in identical form and posture--above all, the plethora of moles, bodies flattened and forelegs splayed [page 55]. All prepared in exactly the same way, but collected to illustrate the differences among specimens that supply fuel to evolutionary change. (Van Heurn's two principal papers on moles treated variation in tooth number and coat color.) Do we not sense a paradox here, in such procedural sameness and rigid formality applied to nature's bounteous diversity? Consider, too, the focus on ordering and labeling, especially in the frugal mode of the taxonomist with boxes of not worth saving. Note the flattened rodent skin housed in the envelope--the original recipient dutifully crossed off and the proper Latin for the rat inserted [see Letters, page 100]. And the obsession with orderly measurement, whether or not any conceptual purpose be served.

But nature always wins in the end. You try, especially if a van Heurnian sense of tidiness be your temperament, to keep everything within proper categories and bounds (not to mention actual boxes). You even face nature's overt oddities with a drive to contain and classify (as in van Heurn's collection of deformed eggs). But there is ultimately too much out there for one man, no matter how assiduous. Too much and too varied. Consider the "uncurated miscellany" [page 53]--including fetal pigs, snakes, moles, mice, cat's guts, a "Siamese twin" apple, slugs, frogs, and toads.

Van Heurn represents an extreme in our eclectic and aesthetic survey of collecting styles--the hyperacquisitive finder and meticulous keeper. This style is easy enough to criticize, particularly from a modern perspective that offers both moral and theoretical doubt--the former from "animal rights" ethicists, the latter from evolutionists and statisticians who know that good samples yield better conclusions than misguided attempts to bag the entirety (though the United States census, as constitutionally Mandated, is still trying to count each son, nose by nose, every ten years).

But we will speak for van Heurn and his way however outdated. He was, first of all, a paragon of commitment, dedication, and knowledge. His colleagues honored this industry and expertise by naming more than forty taxa in his honor over a period of as many years. These species and subspecies, all given the trivial name heurni or vanheurni (though he also became godfather to the reptilian genus Heurnia), span the full range of his concerns from mammals to mollusks (with a mite and several insects in between). Secondly, his legendary courtesy and kindness also betoken a gentler, if less intellectually robust, style of science that did not run entirely on grant proposals and egotism.

Nonetheless, I would base my major defense on an abstract principle, not on van Heurn's personal virtues. Nature's principal theme is infinite variety, both within the bounds of any species, and especially (and obviously) across the stunning range of form in any region or ecosystem. We, as primates evolutionarily committed to vision as a principal sense, comprehend this blooming and buzzing confusion by ordering and classifying, separating and comparing. Van Heurn's style represents a hypertrophy of this basic human instinct for comprehension. Can anyone gainsay the undeniable beauty of his myriad of moles, each rigidly wrought in identical style (the categorization that grants us comprehension), but each just a little bit different (the variety that nature poses both to and against our quest for understanding).

If we value the diversity of natural objects, then we must also cherish the varieties of honorable human behavior. Van Heurn undoubtedly could have found an appropriate pigeonhole for his own peculiarities. Picture him then in this little niche, as the objects of his lifelong passion look upon him, and intone Antony's final assessment of Brutus: "Nature might stand up and say to all the world, `This was a man!'"

COPYRIGHT 2000 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group