60°10”N, 24°57”E #5
When selecting a new home for the sea cow, Bonsdorff’s collection is by no means the only option.
For though Helsinki is a small, provincial town, the bickering among its scientific community rivals that of any seat of learning.
This is why Helsinki contains not one but three natural history collections, and von Nordmann must choose between them.
Clearly, he cannot keep the animal for himself.
He does not have a bone collection of his own, and though he briefly toys with the idea of reconstructing the skeleton in his salon for his own amusement, the notion soon evaporates.
The sea cow is too significant to serve as one man’s private entertainment.
The collection of the Imperial Alexander University is out of the question.
The masterful illustrator von Wright, who was appointed the collection’s first official curator, could barely conceal his astonishment upon seeing the state of the exhibits.
They have been cared for in the shoddiest manner, with assorted remains and hides piled up in corners and left at the mercy of time and the beetles, and von Nordmann has no intention of leaving his treasure in a dusty warehouse alongside untidy heaps of unidentified bones.
The collections of the Flora and Fauna Society, meanwhile, are of the highest order – after all, von Nordmann oversaw their curation himself – but these days he does not even deign to spit in their direction.
He was once an esteemed member of the society, at one point even its chairman, until he attracted the ire of the young Fennomans, who scrutinised his expeditions, his choice of guest lecturers, and the bursaries he awarded.
They accused him of being too cosmopolitan and neglecting the needs of the fatherland.
Von Nordmann cannot understand their stance: roaches and spiders do not have a fatherland, bones and flesh do not demand one take a position on acts of russification, and blood flows through the veins of a Russian scientist just as it does a Swede.
But the young continued their polemics, and eventually the professor left the annual meeting, slamming the door behind him.
The scoundrels of the Flora Society will not get their hands on his skeleton.
And thus, the sea cow shall go to his friend Bonsdorff, the professor of anatomy.
Bonsdorff and von Nordmann first became acquainted while on research expeditions.
They have spent numerous fascinating hours exploring what can be found under a stone and inside rotten trees.
Few people think of insects as anything more than a nuisance, but the two naturalists are united by their appreciation of the beauty of a web spinner or an angel insect.
They pluck these buzzing, humming creatures up with their tweezers, and when a mosquito sinks its slender proboscis into their skin, they do not raise their other hand to squash it but watch its body, pulsing red, then let a second mosquito land next to the first and compare their wings and the disposition of their legs.
Professor of anatomy Evert Julius Bonsdorff examines von Nordmann’s beast contentedly.
A glorious gift indeed, and by way of thanks, he invites von Nordmann for an exquisite dinner.
They too have their differences: von Nordmann believes that in order to fully understand an animal one must examine it alive, observe a spider in its web, a plant in blossom.
Naturally, it is impossible to keep alive all the natural life one studies, and his rooms too are filled with pressed flowers and insects pinned to charts in meticulous order, but from the safety of its aquarium, a fish can tell us things that will be missed once it is lying on the anatomist’s slab.
Only by watching the living creature can one divine, for instance, how the common dragonet uses its fanlike fins, how its eyes dart from side to side, how the gills open and close, but Bonsdorff shakes his head.
The oxygen flowing through an animal’s cells does not change its structure, and with scalpel in hand he becomes more intimately acquainted with an animal than any poet or illustrator, even if they were to draw a fish’s each and every scale.
The two men have their differences, but these they discuss in a brotherly, scholarly manner, and if a debate threatens to escalate into a full-blown argument, they refill their glasses of cognac, change the subject and talk instead about the young and their fanciful notions.
Von Nordmann berates the hotheads of the Flora Society and Bonsdorff complains about his nephew, Johan Axel.
The boy is destined to become an excellent scientist, and it is clear that once he graduates from the lyceum, he will go on to read zoology at the university.
Bonsdorff has already presented the boy to von Nordmann, and the professor thought him a pleasant and knowledgeable young man.
But nowadays he seems enamoured with Darwin’s theories and likes to hold forth to his uncle about the origin of species, though Bonsdorff is careful not to take a stance on the Englishman’s hypotheses.
It is true that a scientist should always be prepared to question the theories of his predecessors.
Even the greatest scientific mind is fallible: in his valedictory lecture before his retirement, the great Linnaeus himself continued to advance the notion that swallows hibernate underwater, slumbering in nests beneath the ice until the sun makes them shoot up to the surface like nimble fish, though anyone who has cut open a swallow’s breast can see that its lungs were designed to breathe air.
Yet another reason a scientist ought not to try to imagine the past or the future but should instead concentrate on what he can see with his own eyes, trusting only that which can be proven and placed under a microscope.
Bonsdorff urges his nephew to be judicious in his opinions.
One should not be taken in by every new-fangled idea or anger one’s professors by clinging to an assertion that may yet prove nothing but wishful thinking, a young man’s folly and ruin.
Bonsdorff is careful in his opinions, but when something appears right, he does not hesitate.
He is the first anatomist at the university to give his students dissection assignments.
Doctors studying under his tutelage must learn to identify a damaged lung, a fatty liver and an exhausted heart.
His methods meet with scepticism among the older generation.
A gentleman should not get his hands dirty but should trust in tradition, he should read the conclusions of his forebears and base his understanding on scientific treatises and educated debate.
In the beginning, perhaps he too thought like this, he wrote his doctoral thesis on natural philosophy and contemplated the nature of life and organisms.
After gaining his doctorate, he set off for Europe to continue his studies, and it was there that he encountered a new kind of science, the rigorous, reassuring principles of empiricism.
At the Karolinska Institute, he sat down in front of a microscope, and the concept of life began to open up to him.
It was a universe of interlinked cells and membranes, nerves, muscles and blood vessels that a scientist can press between two plates of glass.
He picked up his scalpel and charted the circulatory system of toads and examined the complex nervous system of rays.
Eventually, Bonsdorff secured a professorship in Helsinki.
It was only a matter of time. He comes from a family in which having a professorship is as natural as breathing: one may choose the field, but an academic career is a foregone conclusion, and after taking up his position he imposed a set of reforms, introduced dissection into the curriculum and founded the department of comparative anatomy.
Every self-respecting university has a bone collection, but the Imperial Alexander University was still lacking one, so Bonsdorff acquired the skeletons of a horse and a snake and opened a bony exhibition with which to enthral and instruct his students.
Now they can walk through the history of the animal kingdom and learn how life is structured, and how those structures repeat throughout creation.
Bonsdorff carefully follows European scientific developments, and when the great anatomists added human skeletons to their collections, he did the same.
If we can learn more about animals by comparing their bones, should not the human bone tell us something about its bearer?
Bonsdorff did not intend to lag behind his colleagues, and to this end he entered into a curious correspondence: an Egyptian scholar sent him the skull of a local farmer, and Bonsdorff posted him a Finnish skull in return.
Two anatomists, sending each other skulls wrapped in brown paper, rattling their way across continents, unbeknownst to their couriers.
Acquiring such skulls nonetheless presents challenges for the researcher.
People are unwilling to give up the heads of their loved ones to be displayed in the glass cabinets of a university, but luckily there are the poor, the Sámi, the vagrants and criminals, those whose heads nobody would miss or ask after, and curator von Wright even notes the deceased’s misdemeanours on their foreheads: drunkard, adulterer, murderer, Lappish.