Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum

Eye of newt and toe of frog aplenty

Richard Fortey
HarperPress, 352pp, £20,

Mark Fisher

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Mark Fisher reviews Richard Fortey's portrait of the National History Museum

He writes well. The charisma of an expert on fossil fish is caught by the way ‘he pioneered a style of shabby chic … in which a sagging velveteen jacket played an important part’. He marvels at ‘the beauty of lobed leaves’ in the herbariums although he cannot resist alliteration — the tooth of an elephant is ‘a monument of masticatory might’ and insects are ‘pickled in perpetuity, a washed out parade of the panoply of life’.

He has a charming sense of humour, delighting in the Abra cadabra species of clam and, commenting on the eponymous forteyi species of fossil, ‘all of them remarkably handsome examples of their kind’. He has an eye for detail and an ear for the telling phrase: ‘the glue on an old label is a feast’; lepidoptera are ‘the show-offs of the Entomology Department’; trilobites are ‘the beetles of the Palaeozoic’.

His love of the museum is underpinned by a passionate belief in the importance and relevance of natural history, and in the grandeur of its enterprise. No subject, and no museum, is as directly or economically important to us as the NHM, nor as crucial to our understanding of climate change. The 1753 British Museum Act specified that its objects ‘shall remain and be preserved in the Museum for public use for all posterity’.

Fortey’s book is not a polemic but this sense of mission fuels his anger at the way in which, over the past 50 years, science, scholarship and research have been downgraded and marginalised by administration and presentation. His viewpoint throughout is that of the scientist in the field or laboratory, not that of the trustee or director in the boardroom, and at times there is a sharp, cracking noise as scores are settled. It is this, and his appreciation of the potential of the new technologies, that prevents his celebration of the wonders of this museum becoming sentimental or nostalgic. He knows how new molecular techniques, the decoding of genomes and the unravelling of the structure of DNA will help as we continue to explore new worlds, not least in the oceans, those realms of ‘eternal darkness and great pressure’.

Joseph Addison wrote in The Spectator on 26 August 1710 that

it is indeed wonderful to consider that there should be a sort of learned men who are wholly employed in gathering together the refuse of nature … and so hoarding up in the chests and cabinets such creatures as others industriously avoid the sight of.

He anticipated Richard Fortey.