There’s a special place reserved for taxonomic thought and practice, for the description, designation, and naming of species: the enchanted collections of natural history museums, where the diversity of nature is revealed unlike anyplace else, save nature itself. At the same time, the collections are a universe of names that cannot exist independently of their material counterparts. Scientific names are endowed with significance in that they refer to natural entities we are capable of perceiving.
Nowhere is the connection between names as linguistic elements and the biological entities they designate more clearly manifested than in the label. Through its labeling, the museum object crosses the threshold from individual to species, the species formally emancipating itself from the unique attributes of the individual organism. Not only do these natural specimens lose their individuality through their naming, they also become objects within a system of organisms that represents a general idea rather than the concrete. The label turns a formerly living creature into the object of a hypothesis on the existence of a certain biological species.
But hypotheses can change. Indeed, in the realm of language, this type of change takes place in the connection between an object and its name. New names follow the changes, and new labels follow the names. Still, the physical arrangement of objects in a natural history collection is anything but random; instead, it’s dictated by our understanding of the objects’ nature. Species within the same genus are placed alongside one another, as are genera within the same family. If our understanding of things changes, then objects lose the right to their familiar neighbors and are moved elsewhere within the room. “If new knowledge comes to light about an object, it will suddenly be whisked from one shelf into the company of other objects,” Hanns Zischler writes. The “dynamics of abstract concepts” in museum collections are thus expressed further through this movement within the space of the museum.
Language forms the framework within which scientific knowledge is gained and secured. And even if the assigning of a name to an object manifests itself in spatial terms, these physical expressions of order are ultimately subordinate to the linguistic order. It is naming—fastening a name to an object—that creates order within a natural history collection. The physical placement of objects is thus secondary, provided the unambiguous name assignment is ensured by means of the tangible name bearer and its documented inclusion in catalogs and databases.
Even through the act of naming, however, one isn’t entirely uncoupled from the individual in museum collections. It’s still an animal, after all—sitting in the collection, waiting for attention—and as a documented collection piece, individual traces of its life and death can often be reconstructed in some detail. Behind all scientific names are the stories of their objects, of the animals collected in faraway lands that then became the properly preserved objects of scientific fascination. Yet again names and their objects are tied inextricably to the collectors and researchers, experts and amateurs who make the study of nature their life’s work.
Scientific names represent a multidimensional culmination of knowledge and its many forms. Their structured use creates a linguistic likeness of the Book of Life, whose readability is also determined by how closely the established conventions of name creation and use are followed. But as couched in scientific language as the names may be, scientific name creation will continue to be shaped by myriad not infrequently nonscientific influences. It’s to these imperfections that the names owe a great part of their appeal.