And where would you go to see poor Inca now?
現在你去哪里看望可憐的印加呢?
Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.
誰也不知道,因為動物園把那個標本弄丟了。
What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds,
上述故事中最令人費解和吃驚之處在于,作為一個熱愛鳥類的人,
and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
皮爾居然毫不遲疑地打死了數量眾多的鸚鵡。他這樣做沒有任何原因,僅僅是出于興趣。
It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.
很長一段時間以來,那些對世界上的生物有著最強烈興趣的人-往往就是最可能造成它們滅亡的人。這是一個令人震驚的事實。
No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild.
在這方面最典型的一個例子(無論從哪種意義上講)就是萊昂內爾.沃爾特.羅特希爾德,即羅特希爾德男爵二世。
Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow.
作為一個極其富有的銀行家家族的后裔,羅特希爾德是一個性情怪僻、離群索居的人。
He lived his entire life in the nursery wing of his home at Tring, in Buckinghamshire, using the furniture of his childhood
他的一生(1868-1937)都是在白金漢郡特林鎮他們家廂房的育兒室里度過的,使用的家具也都是他從小就一直使用的
even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.
甚至他睡的床也是他小時候睡的幼兒床,盡管他的體重最后重達135千克。
His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects.
他感興趣的是自然史,并且成了一個狂熱的標本收藏家。
He sent hordes of trained men—as many as four hundred at a time—to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains
他派遣了大批訓練有素的人員——一次多達400人——到地球的每一個角落,他們翻山越嶺,
and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens—particularly things that flew.
披荊斬棘,為的就是尋找新的標本——尤其是飛翔物的標本。
These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild's estate at Tring,
他們將收集而來的標本裝箱或打包寄到羅特希爾德在特林鎮的莊園。
where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analyzed everything that came before them,
收到這些標本以后,羅特希爾德和他的一幫助手開始分門別類進行詳盡的登記和研究。
producing a constant stream of books, papers, and monographs—some twelve hundred in all.
在此基礎之上,他出版了一系列的書籍、文集和論文——總計達1200多卷。
Altogether, Rothschild's natural history factory processed well over two million specimens and added five thousand species of creature to the scientific archive.
羅特希爾德的自然史車間加工了200多萬件標本,為科學資料庫增添了5000多個新品種。