第二十三章 豐富多彩的生命
Here and there in the Natural History Museum in London, built into recesses along the underlit corridors or standing between glass cases of minerals and ostrich eggs and a century or so of other productive clutter, are secret doors—at least secret in the sense that there is nothing about them to attract the visitor's notice. Occasionally you might see someone with the distracted manner and interestingly willful hair that mark the scholar emerge from one of the doors and hasten down a corridor, probably to disappear through another door a little further on, but this is a relatively rare event. For the most part the doors stay shut, giving no hint that beyond them exists another—a parallel—Natural History Museum as vast as, and in many ways more wonderful than, the one the public knows and adores.
在倫敦自然史博物館的很多地方，在燈光昏暗的走廊里，在陳列礦物和鴕鳥蛋以及一個多世紀的其他生產性雜物的玻璃柜之間，幽深之處建有秘密的門——說秘密，至少是在這樣的意義上：那里沒有什么值得引起參觀者注意的地方。偶爾你會看到一個人從一扇門里走出來，一副想著什么事的樣子，亂蓬蓬的頭發，看上去像個學者。他腳步匆匆地順著走廊走去，很可能消失在前面另一扇門里。但是，這種事情是很少發生的。在大多數情況下，那些門一直關著，看不出里面還有一個——一個相似的——同樣龐大的，在許多方面比之公眾知道和熱衷的那個博物館還要精彩的自然史博物館。
The Natural History Museum contains some seventy million objects from every realm of life and every corner of the planet, with another hundred thousand or so added to the collection each year, but it is really only behind the scenes that you get a sense of what a treasure house this is. In cupboards and cabinets and long rooms full of close-packed shelves are kept tens of thousands of pickled animals in bottles, millions of insects pinned to squares of card, drawers of shiny mollusks, bones of dinosaurs, skulls of early humans, endless folders of neatly pressed plants. It is a little like wandering through Darwin's brain. The spirit room alone holds fifteen miles of shelving containing jar upon jar of animals preserved in methylated spirit.
自然史博物館里存放著大約7000萬件物品，涵蓋生命的每個范疇，這顆行星的每個角落，每年還向這些收藏品里增添l0萬件左右。但是，實際上你只有看一眼不對外展出的東西，你才會知道這確實是個寶庫。在大柜小櫥里，在設有一排排架子的長長的房間里，瓶子里浸泡著成千上萬件動物標本，方方的卡紙本里別著幾百萬只昆蟲，抽屜里塞滿了亮閃閃的軟體動物、恐龍骨頭、早期人類的顱骨，以及無數被夾子壓得很平整的植物。你簡直有點像在漫游達爾文的電腦。光貯藏室里就有20多公里長的架子，上面放著一罐接一罐的動物，保存在甲基化酒精里。
來源:可可英語 http://www.ccdyzl.cn/Article/201901/575903.shtml
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