HERE AND THERE iural History Museum in London, built into recesses along theu corridors or standiween glass cases of minerals and ostrich eggs and a turyor so of other productive clutter, are secret doors—at least secret in the sehat there isnothing about them to attract the visitor』s notice. Occasionally you might see someohthe distracted manner and iingly willful hair that mark the scholar emerge from ohe doors and hasten down a corridor, probably to disappear through another door a littlefurther on, but this is a relatively rare event. For the most part the doors stay shut, giving nohint that beyond them exists another—a parallel—Natural History Museum as vast as, and inmany ways more wonderful than, the ohe publiows and adores.
The Natural History Museum tains some seventy million objects from every realm oflife and every er of the pla, with another huhousand or so added to thecolle each year, but it is really only behind the ses that you get a sense of what atreasure house this is. In cupboards and ets and long rooms full of close-packed shelvesare kept tens of thousands of pickled animals in bottles, millions of is pio squaresof card, drawers of shiny mollusks, bones of dinosaurs, skulls of early humans, endlessfolders of ly pressed plants. It is a little like wandering through Darwin』s brain. The spiritroom alone holds fifteen miles of shelving taining jar upon jar of animals preserved ihylated spirit.
Back here are spes collected by Joseph Banks in Australia, Alexander von Humboldtin Amazonia, Darwin on the Beagle voyage, and much else that is either very rare orhistorically important or both. Many people would love to get their hands ohings. Afew actually have. In 1954 the museum acquired an outstanding ornithological colle fromthe estate of a devoted collector named Richard Meizhagen, author of Birds of Arabia,among other scholarly works. Meizhagen had been a faithful attendee of the museum foryears, ing almost daily to take notes for the produ of his books and monographs.
When the crates arrived, the curators excitedly jimmied them open to see what they had bee and were surprised, to put it mildly, to discover that a very large number of spesbore the museum』s own labels. Mr. Meizhagen, it turned out, had been helping himself totheir colles for years. It also explained his habit of wearing a large overcoat even duringwarm weather.
A few years later a charming ular in the mollusks department—「quite a distinguishedgentleman,」 I was told—was caught iing valued seashells into the hollow legs of hisZimmer frame.
「I don』t suppose there』s anything ihat somebody somewhere doesn』t covet,」
Richard Fortey said with a thoughtful air as he gave me a tour of the beguiling world that isthe behind-the-ses part of the museum. We wahrough a fusion of departmentswhere people sat at large tables doing i, iigative things with arthropods and palmfronds and boxes of yellowed bones. Everywhere there was an air of unhurried thhness,of people being engaged in a gigantideavor that could never be pleted and mustn』t berushed. In 1967, I had read, the museum issued its report on the John Murray Expedition, anIndian O survey, forty-four years after the expedition had cluded. This is a worldwhere things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarlylooking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceededupwards at about the rate that sediments are laid dow