I gave a half-hour talk about my own experience with the Linnaeus Apostles --- the rest of the talks were in Swedish, and though many sounded great I could only nod dumbly. Swedes speak excellent English, so some guests generously filled me in during the lunch break as to what was actually being said. 

The day before the talk, I visited the Swedish Museum of Natural History. If it were in the center of town, it would probably be a highly profitable tourist enterprise with gift shops on every floor like so many natural history museums on good real estate. Instead it's on the outskirts, part of the university campus, which perhaps gives it less pressure to get with the times.  

And it's filled, as you might expect, with some interesting exhibits, which the highly decorated botanist Bertil Nordenstam (look for "B.Nord" on plant species to find him -- he is immortal) 

was kind enough to show me. Glass cabinets, egg collections, awkward 18th century taxidermy are in abundance, and thankfully. More recent collections were contributed by a professional elephant hunter later killed by an elephant.

One of the most interesting collections of all is not on display -- it's Sweden's share (not the lion's share) of the Linnaean herbaria, most of which ended up in London after being sold by Linnaus' widow, and around which the Linnean society was formed. But Sweden still has at least one fire safe's worth of Linnaean specimens, just kind of sitting there in the hallway of the botany building. Now, having seen the Joseph Banks herbaria at London's Natural History Museum, portions of which are unveiled coquettishly to the public on two tours daily, this presentation seemed jarringly modest. Nordenstam had to fiddle with the key a bit. 

and there it was.

The individual plant specimens in the collection -- some of them types -- have all been electronically imaged and catalogued now, but it's thrilling to see them on their papers, at times preserved dry and at times with a mysterious glue that Linnaeus processed from fish. It has held up well over the centuries; you can see it as traces of white surrounding the leaves.  

Dr. Nordenstam is able to distinguish the handwriting on each specimen, some of which have been heavily marked and annotated, starting with Linnaeus, or his son Carl, any number of their students. 

This specimen was part of a wealthy collector's private herbarium that Linnaeus was helping curate, I think with the aim to have each illustrated and turned into a book -- at any rate the collector preferred his specimens in little decorative pots.

And this is why 18th century natural history is so much more fun than 21st century natural history.  

I hadn't written a bad book review in a while, nor was I in any particular mood to, when I was sent a copy of "Walking the Amazon" by Ed Stafford, who earned himself a Guinness world record by doing just that. The Wall Street Journal put the piece behind its paywall, so I'm reproducing below. Thanks to Michael Robinson and his wonderful and wonderfully-named blog on the history of exploration, Time to Eat The Dogs, for a needed dose of context. 

NAVEL EXPLORATION

Ed Stafford was a 31-year-old British army veteran and trekking guide living in Belize when he resolved to walk the full length of the Amazon. "F—ing hell, mate—this is going to be mental," Mr. Stafford told his friend and fellow outdoorsman Luke Collyer after the two had just agreed to walk the entire 4,345 miles from the river's source in Peru to its mouth in Brazil. The feat, if achieved, would land both men in the Guinness Book of World Records, for no one had yet proved mental enough to attempt it.

Mr. Stafford quickly hashed out the expedition's ground rules: They would walk 100% of the journey and never use a motor, sail or even the flow of the river to propel them. If they were forced to cross a body of water in any sort of craft, they would have to walk back to a point on the far bank perpendicular to where they had set out and continue.

In late March 2008, after 15 months of planning, Messrs. Stafford and Collyer flew to Peru, with celebratory hangovers and a pile of satellite equipment and other electronic gear that they would use to video-blog the whole journey. Their mission, since they felt obliged to declare one, was "raising awareness of the need to conserve the rain forest," although, Mr. Stafford acknowledges that "the adventure, the challenge, and therecognition" were more the point. 

It is very difficult to raise awareness of anything when one is only dimly aware of it oneself. "Walking the Amazon," Mr. Stafford's account of his successful 2½-year journey, is a study in contrasts between a noble physical and navigational achievement and a defiantly vacuous intellectual one. Mr. Stafford's extensive trip preparations, which included securing a publicist, sponsorship, NASA satellite photos, and an insurance package that included ferrying a team of English medics to any coordinates he supplied, didn't apparently involve reading up on the countries that the Amazon touches or their inhabitants.

Ethnography isn't Mr. Stafford's thing. "The people were still very indigenous-looking," he writes of one Peruvian settlement. "Despite all of them speaking Spanish, there had been little direct interbreeding with pure Spanish stock here and so tolerance to alcohol was correspondingly low." Neither is natural history. If Mr. Stafford describes an unusual animal, it is most often because it is poised to attack or because he is forced to eat it. The author explains that exhaustion prevented him from treating the Amazon as anything but an obstacle course. "Retaining interest in what we were seeing daily was harder than you might think," he writes. "The wonders of nature might as well have been whitewashed walls."

But Mr. Stafford did reserve sufficient energy to chronicle his wavering psychological health and his battles against "negativity," all the while taking measure of his own toughness, especially when there was some unfortunate soul around for him to measure it against. His accounts of visits by journalists, old friends, or well-meaning sponsors tend to end with them physically shattered and swollen from insect bites, with Mr. Stafford's morale boosted accordingly. "[T]he sense of rejuvenation was empowering," he writes after one hobbles off.

Even Mr. Collyer, a competitive climber and kayaker, is depicted as a slowpoke who is always calling his girlfriend, eating in fancy restaurants or buying donkeys to transport his heavy gear. When Mr. Collyer quits the expedition, oddly enough after a row over an iPod, Mr. Stafford feels "an exhilarating surge of freedom," as he is finally able to "throw off the past weeks of negativity" and get on with it. He is lucky to find a new travel companion in Gadiel "Cho" Sanchez Rivera, a Peruvian evangelical Christian whom Mr. Stafford is quick to inform that all religion is crap. Yet the meditative, Bible-toting Mr. Sanchez Rivera passes the toughest test of all: For thousands of miles, over varyingly hostile terrain, he manages to get along with Mr. Stafford.

In video blogs from his journey, when he is earnestly answering questions sent by schoolchildren from Pennsylvania, Mr. Stafford comes off as charming and even self-deprecating; in his book he is all hero, a Frank Buck steeped in self-help dogma. Surrounded by angry Ashaninkas in face paint pointing arrows at him, Mr. Stafford isn't afraid but rather adrenalized, time slowing and his senses sharpening until he is able to "ignore all that is not relevant to immediate survival." Crossing a dangerously isolated stretch of terrain, nearly starving, with no food in his pack and none in sight, "represented everything that, deep down, I wanted from the expedition."

Toward the end of the author's account, as he and Mr. Sanchez Rivera are in Brazil and soon to run giddily into the crashing Atlantic surf, Mr. Stafford mentions Henry Walter Bates, the 19th-century Englishman whose own Amazon explorations lasted 11 years and whose travails were no less formidable. This reference invites an unflattering comparison, for in his own travelogue Bates played down his struggles, the better to highlight the wonders he encountered, leaving a narrative as engrossing today as it no doubt was in 1863.

Mr. Stafford emerged from his Amazon adventure a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, of which Bates himself was once secretary. But the very idea of exploration has changed since Bates's day. Mr. Stafford is only the latest of many modern explorers to make his personal crucible his overriding focus. As the historian of exploration Michael Robinson has noted in books and on his blog, it is in part because they have little choice. There are few if any truly unexplored places left in the world, and national pride and economic gain are no longer fashionable motives for exploring. Celebrated most nowadays are firsts of identity and method: the youngest pilot to fly solo around the world; the first woman to circumnavigate Australia in a kayak. Mr. Stafford deserves credit for being not only the first to walk the Amazon but the first to explore his navel while doing so.

which is illegal most places anyway, might consider "green burial," by which you just get wrapped in a sheet and buried in a designated wood or meadow, where some handsome Nicrophorus americanus may show up to raise grubs in you. 

I don't know that a stuffed Knut has been unveiled as of yet, but I did have the chance to write for TLS last month on stuffing in general, thanks to an interesting essay collection edited by J.M.M. Alberti on animals that have earned themselves an "afterlife" as museum specimens. I can't link to TLS pieces but I can reproduce the text:

An Honour to be Stuffed? 

Sir Roger, an Asian elephant, was enjoying his favorite breakfast of a bucket of wet bran when a firing party of four men shot him in the head. As a resident of the Scottish Zoo and Variety Circus in Glasgow, Sir Roger had entertained menagerie-goers without incident for 16 years, but owing to a bad case of musth, the hormonal surge that can make male elephants menacing and unmanageable, Sir Roger’s owner Edward Henry Bostock decided to dispatch with him. Bostock charged admission to Sir Roger’s “execution” in December 1900, and no sooner was Sir Roger dead than the taxidermists and anatomists arrived to immortalize him. Selected soft parts of Sir Roger were preserved for study, his skeleton saved, and his skin turned into a mounted specimen that looked remarkably good for having taken 10 bullets. He had even been supplied a set of artificial tusks posthumously; the living Sir Roger had none.   

Bostock exhibited Sir Roger for several weeks at the zoo before donating the skin to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, where it was visited by many who had known Sir Roger in life. But after the Second World War, when Sir Roger was only dimly remembered, the skin was repurposed as simply “Elephant, Adult Male”, surrounded by other Indian species in a diorama evoking a forest. Naturalistic displays were by then the fashion, and “[i]magining him being led through the Glasgow streets or pulling a menagerie trailer wouldn’t have worked so well”, conclude Richard Sutcliffe, Mike Rutherford, and Jeanne Robinson, co-authors of one of the many remarkable essays in The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie, which traces the careers of several famous and some anonymous museum specimens in life and as artifacts.

For animals like Sir Roger, whose true story is now a prominent part of his Kelvingrove display,

death “is not the event horizon we might assume it to be”, writes Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, the anthology’s editor and contributor of an essay on Maharajah, a Manchester elephant with a career trajectory similar to Sir Roger’s, minus the violent end. To explore the “shifting meaning of singular animals and their remains”, as Alberti describes the authors’ task here, is a great challenge, in part because some of the remains themselves are difficult to trace back to living animals, and also because, over the century-odd period covered in these essays, attitudes toward the exhibition of animals living and dead have changed so dramatically, often without obvious reason. A century ago a visitor to the skeleton of Maharajah the elephant found himself unable to decide whether the shrine-like display constituted “an outlined mockery or a noble monument”, and one might wonder the same today.

To articulate a skeleton or mount the skin of a beloved zoo animal was a gesture of honor from the late 19^th century through much of the 20^th, when remains were often displayed on the grounds of the zoo where the animal had lived, or in a museum close by. Alfred the Gorilla, of Bristol Zoo, and Chi-Chi the panda, of the London Zoo, were both preserved after their untimely deaths in 1948 and 1972, respectively, but when Guy the Gorilla died in 1978 the public was suddenly incensed at the prospect of “stuffing the Guy”, writes contributor Henry Nicholls, instead of giving him a decent burial. Nicholls cites the increasing popularity of natural history broadcasting in the 1970s as the reason for this sudden distaste for posed dead creatures, which seems plausible. Museums everywhere were shutting down their taxidermy departments in that era.

But then, some 30 years later, a female northern bottlenose whale swam through the Thames barrier, got confused and dehydrated, and died before cameras and thousands of onlookers before it could be rescued. Contributor Richard C. Sabin, curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum, was surprised to be faced with impassioned demands that the Thames whale – one of hundreds of cetaceans to become stranded and die in the U.K. in any given year – be given the taxidermic treatment. Dead whales are customarily dumped in landfills, but Sabin found himself “continually pressed on the stuffing and pickling issue,” until in the end the museum, with the support of donations from readers of The Sun, agreed to clean, articulate, and display the skeleton. Like Guy and Chi-Chi before it, “the Thames whale has become a celebrity specimen,” Sabin concludes, with “detailed, multilayered, and important narratives” attached to it.

Contributor Geoffrey N. Swinney chalks the phenomenon of celebrity specimens up to anthropomorphism. Most, after all, have been large charismatic mammals with names attached. Guy, Chi-Chi and the Thames whale were all, even while alive, “appropriated and reconstructed in our image,” he writes, with the rebuilding of each carcass serving to “divest the animal of those aspects of its animality – its beastliness – which serve to remind us humans of our own biology and the beast within.” By contrast, writes contributor Sophie Everest, the millions of anonymous, desiccated, hollow-eyed study specimens that comprise the bulk of museum holdings are  “absolute in their deadness”, and represent, to some museum curators, an “uncomfortable reminder of a human-animal relationship to which they no longer subscribe.”

So is it still an honor to be stuffed? The clamor over the Thames whale showed that a number of people believe it so, and the amazing thing is that it continues to happen, considering the decline of museum taxidermy in general. These days the vast majority of zoo elephants are either buried or rendered into animal feed when they die. But in 2010 a zoo in Neunkirchen, Germany, hosted an exhibition of animals preserved in plastic. The star of the show was an elephant that had lived and died at the zoo, and the exhibit proved so popular it was held over for months. The same year a nature park in Mumbai proudly unveiled the mounted remains of an elephant that had drowned there three years earlier.

In an essay on Balto, Togo, and Fritz, the sled dogs that in 1925 braved ice floes and blinding snows to bring diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska (and were stuffed after their natural deaths in tribute), contributor Rachel Poliquin finds that quality of an animal’s afterlife depends largely on whether its life is remembered. Balto, the most famous of the dogs, was maintained posthumously in his fluffy glory in Cleveland, Ohio, while Togo disintegrated into a shabby mess in Vermont, and poor Fritz ended up at a tacky amusement park, then in the hands of an antiques dealer who hadn’t the slightest idea who or what he was. “Separated from their heroic deeds, Togo and Fritz were confined to oblivion."