CCCaaabbbiiinnneeettt ooff CCCuuurrriiiooosssiiitttiiieeesss Collecting And Understanding Wonders The of The Natural World Gordon Grice WORKMAN PUBLISHING • NEW YORK For Tracy, Parker, Beckett, Griffin, and Abby Copyright © 2015 by Gordon Grice All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced —mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written permission of the publisher. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son, Limited. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-0-7611-6927-7 Cover design by Raquel Jaramillo and Colleen AF Venable Interior design by Raquel Jaramillo and Gordon Whiteside Front cover photo by Raquel Jaramillo Back cover photos: Picsfive/Shutterstock.com (vintage papers); Bertrand Benoit/CGtextures (wood background); Dover Publications, Inc. (octopus and beetle) Photo research by Raquel Jaramillo For additional photo and art credits, please see page 188, which constitutes a continuation of the copyright page. Workman books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk for premiums and sales promotions as well as for fund-raising or educational use. Special editions or book excerpts can also be created to specification. For details, contact the Special Sales Director at the address below or send an email to [email protected]. Workman Publishing Company, Inc. 225 Varick Street New York, NY 10014–4381 workman.com WORKMAN is a registered trademark of Workman Publishing Co., Inc. Printed in China First printing September 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 •ii• contents 1 Introduction: My First Cabinet 14 Part one: Classifying Life on Earth {How to Organize All Living Things} 17 Chapter One: Classification 34 Part two: Animalia {The Animal Kingdom} 37 Chapter Two: Phylum Chordata 77 Chapter Three: Phylum Arthropoda 125 Chapter Four: Phylum Mollusca 135 Chapter Five: Phyla Echinodermata, Cnidaria, and Porifera 144 Part three: Plantae {The Plant Kingdom} 147 Chapter Six: Divisions Magnoliophyta, Pinophyta, Ginkgophyta, and Lycophyta 162 Part four: Mineralium 165 Chapter Seven: Minerals, Gemstones, and Rocks (Plus Fossils) 182 Afterword: Curiosities 187 Acknowledgments 187 About the Author 188 Photo and Art Credits •iii• •iv • INTRODUCTION MY FIRST CABINET W hen I was about six, I started my first cabinet of curi- osities. The first thing I put in it was a skunk’s skull I found in our backyard. The skull fit perfectly in my palm. It had sharp little teeth. I was surprised to notice that they looked like my dogs’, with long, jagged canines on the sides. Without its lips, the skull seemed stuck in a snarl. Fur still clung to it—black with a stripe of white down the forehead. I put the skull in a red cigar box my dad gave me. The box was made of sturdy cardboard with a hinged lid. I was soon using it to collect all sorts of things I found outdoors, from old coins to corncobs. Over the years I found many items to add to my cigar box. One day our dogs came home with porcupine quills stuck in their mouths and snouts. They had fought a porcupine and lost. My dad pulled the quills out with pliers and gave them to me. They were about the size of toothpicks. The stuff they •iv • • 1• were made of felt like fingernails. Into my cigar box they went. Another time, THE WORD CABINET ITSELF WAS PROBABLY DERIVED my sister and I found some wooden seed FROM THE LATIN WORD CAVEA. THESE WERE THE pods called devil’s claws. Into the box UNDERGROUND STALLS IN WHICH THE ANIMALS THAT they went. When my pet tarantula died, WOULD BE FIGHTING AGAINST GLADIATORS WERE KEPT. into the box he went. That cigar box became my first cabinet of curiosities. I didn’t call it that at the time. I only learned that term later. THE AGE OF EXPLORATION People have been keeping collections like the one I started in my cigar box for more than two thousand years. In ancient times, collections of curiosities were kept in temples. In the city of Carthage, for example, the temple for the goddess Astarte was said to house many strange things for people to look at—even the skin of a chimpan- zee. A whalebone was displayed in the temple of Asclepius in Sicyon, and a temple in Naples kept an elephant skull. In ancient Rome, temples held vast collections of curiosities from all over the empire, plus paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and books. (In those days, books were rare and extremely valuable.) It wasn’t until much later that collections started to be kept in special cabinets. Nowadays, we think of cabinets as pieces of furniture. Kitchen cabinets. Toy cabinets. Storage cabinets. Basically, any piece of furniture that has shelves, or drawers, and maybe doors is called a cabinet. But the word cabinet goes back to the Middle Ages. In France, a cabinet was a “small room.” In time it came to mean any place where • 2•