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Credit: Natural History Museum, London
As the Natural History Museum celebrates the 150th anniversary of scientist Charles Davies Sherborn, Karolyn Shindler recounts his achievements.
Charles Davies Sherborn, the great British taxonomist, described himself as '’a magpie” with a “card-index mind’’. And that mind created one of the defining pieces of Victorian scholarship – an index of every living or extinct animal discovered between 1758 and 1850. To this day his Index Animalium remains a bible for every zoologist and palaeontologist and contains about 440,000 names extracted by Sherborn from thousands of academic works.
He compiled it single-handedly over 43 years, from 1890 to 1933, publishing each section as it was completed. He recorded the name of each animal, with the book or journal in which it was first noted, on a small slip of paper: by 1916 there were more than one million slips. The Index, which totals more than 9,000 pages, was a true labour of love – for shamefully little financial reward. His prize was an honorary doctorate from Oxford, which gave him enormous pleasure, and the congratulations of the trustees of the Natural History Museum (NHM), for which he had laboured for most of his life, though he never received a regular salary.
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