What is Life?
Find out at the National Museum of Natural History
LET us first look up. The Natural History Museum of Manila possesses a domed glass ceiling supported by interlocking arcs of steel. It floods the museum’s central courtyard with light. Although smaller in scale and not as mighty and magnificent as some — think of London’s British Museum and its Great Court vaulted glass and steel ceiling, or the vast metal roof of King’s Cross railway station concourse — it is dazzling, confident, and inspiring.
Natural history asks questions about our natural world — the plants and animals that inhabit the earth, their origins, anatomy, evolution, behavior, and relationships to one another and their environments, using methods of science.
In 1788, James Edward Smith, the first president of the Linnaean Society of London, sat down and wrote his Introductory Discourse on the Rise and Progress of Natural History. The book, an excellent example of Enlightenment thinking, a European intellectual movement which produced such game-changing philosophers and mathematicians as John Locke (1632-1704) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727), enthusiastically connected the study of natural history with the excitement of discovery, the growth of knowledge, advanced learning and objectivity, progress and humanity’s liberation from the dark, irrationality of superstition. Natural history, Smith thought, was part of the universal study of humankind.
Manila’s newly opened Natural History Museum conveys these ideals. The Philippines, home to between 70 percent and 80 percent of the earth’s plant and animal species, is one of the world’s mega-biodiverse countries, and the museum strives to do justice to this fact. One walks through rooms dedicated to the diversity of environments and ecosystems supported by the archipelago’s forests, swamps, arid plains, rivers, lakes and seas.
I was thrilled, for instance, to see the Rafflesia plant, which grows on the wet, misty slopes of Mount Makiling, and whose single flower emits an odor that is likened to the smell of a rotting corpse; the graceful Sarus Crane, a bird that once roamed central Luzon’s Candaba Marsh, extinct since the 1980s; and the spot-billed pelican, which lived along Laguna de Bay, where I grew up. I had never seen it. Laguna’s pelican has been extinct since the 1940s due to habitat loss. And it was rather fun to “splash” about on the virtual waves created by an interactive hologram on the floor of the section on marine life.
Slide open the drawers in the terrestrial rooms and marvel at the museum’s collection of butterflies and other insects. I take a particular interest in beetles, Coleoptera, the most numerous and arguably the most important organisms on the plant. The species on show were, disappointingly, on the scanty side but more would come, our museum guide assured me. Beetles live just about anywhere — in trees, water, soil, and our homes. They range in size from the delicate and tiny, to the monstrous. I missed a specific example.
Every Filipino child who grew up in the proximity of coconut trees, like I did, knows the Asiatic Oryctes rhinoceros, or the coconut palm rhino beetle. These creatures eat the fronds and tunnel through the crown of palms and are reviled by coconut farmers. But they are doughty and robust, grow an outstanding horn, and are tasty prey to everything from pigs to ants.
Collecting specimens from the natural world has a long and amazing history in the Philippines. The first treatise on indigenous medicinal plants was written by the Franciscan friar Father Blas de la Madre de Dios in 1611. One of the earliest collectors known to historians was the Jesuit missionary Georg Josef Camel (1661-1706) who was born in Brno, Moravia in what is today the Czech Republic. His superb collection of flora and manuscripts of drawings are unfortunately preserved outside of the Philippines, in London’s Natural History Museum. The Naturalists’ room gives glimpses of some these astonishing endeavors that occurred well before the arrival of American scientists at the turn of the 20th century.
Manila’s Natural History Museum is a proud achievement. It is also a work in progress, which is a very good thing in a field that needs to remain dynamic and relevant. Ongoing developments within the museum are the sections concerned with climate change, the latest scientific discoveries, and the work being done by conservationists to protect wild life sites.
I am looking forward to seeing more information on the collections that were amassed prior to the 20th century, as the bulk of the specimens on display date from the late 1940s. What happened to Manila’s Botanical Garden and Herbarium, for instance? Enlarging the scope of the exhibits on the work done by US colonial scientists and collectors linked to the Bureau of Science, would also be a great boon. Finally, I would think a gift shop well supplied with merchandise specially produced for the museum, is a no-brainer.
These are my own inconsequential gripes. This museum never loses sight of the big picture. What is Life, it asks? The most important question to humanity.
rachelagreyes@gmail.com
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