Work in Progress

An anniversary, a tragic story and a strong link with the University of Groningen are good reasons for an exhibition at the Special Collections department of the University Library (UB). Two hundred years ago, on 8 September 1823 to be precise, the natural scientist Johan Conrad van Hasselt died on the island of Java. He was only 26 years old. Two years earlier, on 14 September 1821, his bosom friend and colleague Heinrich Kuhl , 23 years of age, had also died on Java. Both young men had met while studying at the University of Groningen under Professor Van Swinderen—yes, the one whose name is given to the Huys on Boteringestraat .

While preparing for the exhibition, I was scouring the UB with a colleague for traces of Kuhl and Van Hasselt. Thanks to the informative booklet by Charles Klaver on the young natural scientists, we soon found quite a few traces that the young men, especially Kuhl, had left in the collection. We unearthed the copy of Kuhl’s booklet on German bats with the handwritten dedication ‘Dem Herrn Prof. van Swinderen vom Verfasser’ on the title page. Meanwhile, copies of all their other publications had also surfaced.

Thanks to Klaver, we also knew that loose strips with Kuhl’s notes could be found in Seba’s Thesaurus. Albertus Seba, an Amsterdam-based pharmacist, had his rich cabinet of objects of natural history published between 1734 and 1765 in four lavishly-illustrated volumes published in folio format. A black-and-white version was available for ‘ordinary’ rich people, while very rich people could buy a deluxe, hand-coloured edition. Both a complete regular set and a complete deluxe set can be found in the Special Collections of the UB Groningen.

Seba already somewhat categorized the objects in his book, but there was no unified international system in place yet to describe nature. His Thesaurus did play a role in developing such a system. The Swedish natural scientist Carolus Linnaeus in fact visited old Seba in Amsterdam and extensively browsed his collection while writing the first edition of his influential Systema Naturae , from which we have inherited the double Latin names of animals and plants. Unfortunately, Seba died in 1736, a year after the publication of the first Systema Naturae, never having been able to make use of Linnaeus’ system himself.

During his studies, Kuhl came up with the idea of providing the objects—especially the reptiles—from Seba’s Thesaurus with scientific names. He did so using separate insert strips on which he wrote the Latin name he found by then in numerous systematic zoological works. There are still numerous of Kuhl’s strips present in the first two volumes of the poor rich man’s version from the UB.

Linnaeus came too late for Seba. Others frowned upon his work. One of these people was the French scholar Georges-Louis Leclerc, better known as Buffon. In his famous work Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière , published between 1749 and 1789 in 36 volumes, he stubbornly stuck to French names for all natural history objects, which wasn’t helpful in a scientific world that was becoming increasingly Linnean in its thinking. For Kuhl however, this meant another fun job awaited him. Consequently, in 1820 the booklet Buffoni et Daubentoni figurarum avium coloratarum nomina systematica (Systematic names of the coloured bird illustrations of Buffon and Daubenton) was published, listing all bird illustrations with Buffon’s French names and the Latin names that Kuhl had assigned to them.

Meanwhile, my colleague had also pulled out Van Swinderen’s handwritten autobiography covering the period between 1784 and 1816. In it, Van Swinderen reports that he managed to acquire Buffon’s works for the UB in 1815. Hoping to perhaps also find some of Kuhl’s strips in these works, we went looking in the collection for Buffon’s works, specifically those with the birds that Kuhl had provided with scientific names in his booklet.

We did find Buffon’s original Histoire naturelle, but it just so happened to be missing the sections on birds. The numerous reissues and translations were published after 1820, so Kuhl could never have used those. What could he have used then? Disappointed, as we stood in the aisle of natural history works, our eyes fell on a stack of boxes on the lower shelves. We opened one of these boxes and immediately saw a beautiful illustration of a bird. There was no further reference to exactly what kind of illustrations they were. A nice find, because they happened to be beautiful old illustrations, but was it Buffon or not?

In the same aisle, my eye suddenly caught on a bound book with Buff List Alp^h des Oise written on the binding in beautiful French writing. I picked up the book, flipped it open and that’s where I discovered that it was not a printed book, but a bound manuscript. I also noticed that it had the same shelf mark as the set of illustrations we had just looked at. The manuscript, entitled Liste alphabetique des noms des oiseaux contenus dans les planches enluminées, consisted of pages that were full of tables. Those tables contained hundreds of French bird names, arranged alphabetically, each with three columns of numbers. The first two columns, which were written in pen but in a different handwriting from the bird names, each contained a section number and an illustration number. The third column, written in pencil in yet another handwriting, also consisted of numbers.

When we took out the six boxes of illustrations to see how they related to each other, we found that the numbers in the second column corresponded to the printed numbers on the illustrations and that the numbers in the third column corresponded to the numbers written in pencil and in the same handwriting on each illustration. Much to our surprise, we also found that almost all the illustrations at the bottom had been given a Latin species name in Kuhl’s handwriting, who also turned out to have filled in the first two handwritten columns.

Work in progress, then. What we had found was a complete set of Buffon and Daubenton's bird illustrations —1008 of them, published in 42 issues of 24 illustrations each between 1770 and 1783—with notes by Kuhl and his complete index in preparation for the publication of the Nomina systematica. All we have to do now is find Kuhl’s unpublished Seba index, of which Van Swinderen claimed to have distributed it amongst his colleagues. Seek, and ye shall find, right?