Arachne was the finest weaver in the land. Her tapestries were so exquisite that word of her skills reached the gods themselves. However, Minerva, the goddess of crafts, was envious that a mortal should receive such praise and challenged the young woman to a weaving competition. The two weave, but even the gods cannot find a single flaw in Arachne’s tapestry. However, this skill does not bring her happiness, as the goddess will not settle for a draw and attacks the young weaver. Arachne is shocked at the goddess’s wrath, and when she sees the girl’s sadness, Minerva relents. She saves Arachne from death andgives her eight limbs with which to weave her fabrics. Now she can weave perfect creations in peace until the end of time, remaining invisible and innominate, hidden in dark corners and the notches of trees, for such is the price of boastfulness, the fate of all those who seek a position that is not theirs to take.
As the expedition nears its end, von Nordmann is content. He will return with von Steven’s plants and his impressive collection of spiders, a collection including several species hitherto unknown to science. The collaboration with Miss Olson has exceeded all his expectations. His assistant has shown herself to be a most excellent microscopic illustrator, and perhaps more surprisingly, a skilled collector too. Miss Olson can survive in the field – better than the professor, in fact, as von Nordmann is plagued by an injury he sustained in childhood. She clambers across the rocks alongside him, swatting away mosquitoes, and shows exceptional aptitude for learning. Watching the way she stretches out the many-jointed limbs of the wasp spider and pins them to the chart, he makes up his mind: the expedition is coming to an end, but their collaboration will continue. Next they will document the spiders of the forests, bogs and shores of Finland, many of which are still waiting to be named.
Upon returning from the Crimea, the professor grants Miss Olson a short holiday. Von Nordmann must go through the specimens he took from von Steven and write up the notes from their trip, so Miss Olson travels back to Ostrobothnia to visit her sister, but even on holiday she cannot forget about the spiders. She is used to training her eyes on arthropods, and suddenly she sees them everywhere. In the past, she was able to work at her desk without paying any attention to the creatures buzzing about, but now there is no place where she cannot find a spider. She learns to sense the domestic house spider under her washstand and to spot the zebra spider wandering across the ceiling. This is her favourite spider, a lively, nimble creature that upon seeing her raises its upper body and shakes its limbs, as though waving at her, and as her sister looks on in amazement, she carries jars of soapy water out into the garden. In the morning, she collects her rewards, the spiders and insects that have crawled into her slippery jar overnight. Upon coming across a species that she does not recognise, she submerses it in ethanol, wraps the test tubes in cotton wool and sends her discoveries to the professor:here for your consideration are some of the species I encountered, which I was unable to identify and which I thought you may appreciate.
In total, Hilda Olson paints more than four hundred spiders for the professor, four hundred reproductions of arthropods drawn with microscopic precision, and von Nordmann is so happy with his assistant that he makes the bold gesture of naming one of these species not only after himself but after Miss Olson too. The creature is christenedOlsonia pilifera Nordmann, a long-limbed testament to their collaboration. It later transpiresthat the same spider has in fact already been named elsewhere, and the name that von Nordmann gave it does not live on, but Miss Olson does not know this and immortalises the creature on paper with jubilant strokes of the brush.
Miss Olson and von Nordmann usually meet in the grounds of the botanical gardens, but today the professor has asked her to come to the university. He has been waiting for the arrival of this animal for a long time – a magnificent, long-awaited beast of the sea – so Miss Olson climbs the stone steps up to the university’s main building and walks in between the white columns framing the entrance. The janitor is taken aback at the sight of a young lady stepping through the doors and asks quite what she is doing there. The University of Zürich has recently taken a revolutionary step in opening some of their programmes to women, but as yet there are no womenfolk gracing the corridors of the Imperial Alexander University. Here the only feminine presence is the alabaster Artemis standing in the foyer. Miss Olson was prepared for this befuddlement, and she tries to remain calm and composed, though the stares of the passing students make her distinctly uncomfortable. She is unaccustomed to drawing attention to herself, but now she stands out from the crowd like a bright-red velvet mite in a collection of spiders. She takes a breath and explains that she is here at the express request of the professor of botany and zoology, and with that the janitorswallows his objections and shows her to Bonsdorff’s collections. Miss Olson steps inside, and the befuddlement follows with her. Of course, everyone has already heard about von Nordmann’s assistant – after they set off for the Crimea, the university gossips spoke of little else – but seeing her here in the flesh is another matter entirely, and upon seeing how satisfied von Nordmann looks watching Bonsdorff wonder how best to greet the woman who has just entered his study, the professor of anatomy cannot escape the thought that his old friend might be playing some kind of prank on him.
“Now, look at this, Miss Olson! Here we have a creature whose anatomical survey is sure to arouse international interest!” Von Nordmann dashes from one bone to the next, and Miss Olson looks at the pieces of the animal laid out on the floor: ribs, vertebrae and, on the table, a skull in two parts: the crown and the jawbone lying next to each other. She looks at the bones, but they mean nothing to her. She is not acquainted with skeletons, nor does she understand anything about this animal other than that it is enormous, but she does not let this trouble her. She is an illustrator. She does not need to know; all she has to do is see, her skills are in the art of looking closely and reproducing, so she remains unperturbed at the creature’s strangeness and begins instead to scrutinise its bones, assessing their texture and examining the joins along the skull.
The sea cow is a magnificent specimen, though few researchers will ever find themselves up here in the coldest, remotest corner of Europe. But the postal service works, and von Nordmann has already agreed to give a lecture on theanimal and for this lecture to be published in a large print edition. Scientists may not be able to view his specimen in person, so the specimen must travel to them in printed form, and for this, precise drawings of the bones are essential. For a moment, von Nordmann considers drawing them himself. Even his eyes are good enough to reproduce the sea cow, but he is short of time. He only received the bones yesterday, but he has already agreed to hold his lecture at the beginning of the semester, in only three weeks’ time, when the animal will become the focus of everyone’s unwavering attention. His time will be spent writing, so let Miss Olson do the drawings.
Von Nordmann wants the lecture hall to be so full that the slowest will be left without a seat, but for that he needs more than learned words. He needs drawings too, the whole animal, so that those enthusiastic souls who have gathered to hear his lecture can leave the lecture hall and walk to the collections to witness his story for themselves. He and Miss Olson must reconstruct the sea cow for people to see, put the bones together, and when the master in charge of the bone collection complains about the short notice, the professor dismisses him with a wave of the hand. Surely von Wright understands that what they have before them is a quite unique creature, and if two professors of zoology and their assistants cannot put one vertebrate together in three weeks, something is surely amiss.
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 neglectingthe 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 hisrooms 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 theKarolinska 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 inbrown 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.
The crowning glory of Bonsdorff’s skull collection is undoubtedly the head of the Vesivehmaa Ripper, the serial killer Juhani Aataminpoika. If a man’s evil accumulates in his skull, what better skull to put on display than that of a man nicknamed the Executioner, a man who killed twelve innocent women and who is said to have gorged on the hearts of their unborn babies? If any skull can show small bumps that indicate a propensity for cruelty, then surely it must be that of a man who could commit such atrocities. But Bonsdorff is not interested in the constitution of people’s souls, but rather in the neurological messages passing through their nervous system. He has no time to examine the skulls, but he amasses a collection for future scholars, and now the skull of the Executioner resides there among all the others, staring at students from its shelf with empty eyes, reminding them that behind every face is a shared structure of thick, white bone, waiting to be revealed.
Hilda Olson finds the skulls gathered on the shelves hideous, but she tries not to think about the people to whom they once belonged and instead focuses her attention on the task at hand. She has never worked with bones or mammals before, and to her eyes the remains that the professor has laid out in the room look disproportionate and alien. She is more used to spiders, to tiny creatures that only give up their secrets once they are placed under the ocular lens, but this animal’s bones are large and thick, and she is unsure quite where to start. What does von Nordmann want her to do? Is there some kind of etiquette when it comes to drawing a skeleton, an order in which the bones should be committed to paper, an unspoken rule that is clear to anatomists but unknown to the daughter of a sea captain? She does not know where to start, but neither does she wish to show them her hesitation. She has already seen Bonsdorff’s sceptical glances, von Wright’s expectant expression, but von Nordmann does not leave her high and dry, and hands her a sheet of paper. He has come up with a list of the images he wants: first she is to draw the skull from above, then from beneath and behind, making sure to include the internal structures of the head. After this, she is to draw the principal vertebrae from different angles, then move on to the shoulder blades, the bones of the arms, the sternum and ribs.
A concentrated murmur ripples through Bonsdorff’s study. Von Wright sketches a suitable frame to hold the skeleton, Hacklin the janitor writes a list of all the materials they will need, calculates the prices and begins carrying in tools and sacks of gypsum. Von Nordmann and Bonsdorff examine thebones and compare observations, discuss qualities specific to this species, and Miss Olson sits down by the window and starts to draw.
Von Nordmann has placed the sea cow’s skull on the table in front of her. He has turned it upside down, and she examines it, the vessel that once contained the sea cow’s brain, eyes and fleshy tongue. Now all that is left is an empty space between the bones, and she considers the best way to represent the skull’s joins and porous surfaces.
Be it a spider or a bone, she examines her subjects like a sculpture or a bust to be reproduced, for were she to think of the creature itself, she would have to think of its death too, the traps, the nets, ropes and bullets, and then the anatomy professor’s collection would seem an unfathomable, cruel mausoleum. But as she walks behind von Nordmann through Bonsdorff’s exhibits, she does not think of a living human or creature but imagines herself wandering through an illustrated encyclopaedia without returning to the moment when within this rib cage, now held together with bolts, was once a heart, still beating, and a set of lungs filling with air.
Von Nordmann is disappointed. Furuhjelm claimed to have found a complete skeleton, but this set of bones is incomplete: it is missing its hands and fingers. Half of each front limb is also missing, and if they were to erect the skeleton in its current state, it would look as though it were groping at the air with blunt, inelegant stumps. It is true that Steller wrote in his notes that the sea cow lacked bones in its hands, but this claim has since been dismissed. All marinemammals have fingerbones hidden inside their flippers. This is the case for whales, seals and porpoises, so why would the sea cow be an exception? It is easier to assume the naturalist must have been mistaken. It would hardly be surprising if a man on the verge of starvation had not noticed the slender bones hidden inside the sea cow’s rigid flippers, and his equipment and the prevailing conditions left much to be desired. The sea cow’s fingers have not been preserved, but that doesn’t mean they did not exist. The lack of these bones is down to the ineptness of those who discovered the skeleton, and carpenters and preparators across Europe begin to imagine what the sea cow’s limbs must have been like. The sea cow is imagined with long fingers, short fingers, broad hands, small hands, and von Nordmann recalls the specimen he saw in Cuvier’s collection in Paris, its skeleton adorned with fists cast from gypsum, and he asks von Wright to examine Bonsdorff’s collection of marine mammals, seals and walruses, and to design the sea cow some beautiful wooden prostheses.
The carpenter fashions a pair of hands, which the professors attach to the sea cow’s elbows, inserting pieces of wood to replace the decomposed cartilage so that the creature’s barrel-like chest opens up in front of them in all its beauty. The sight is nothing short of majestic. Hacklin the janitor has built a brass trellis to support the skeleton. A single skeleton usually requires only one or two brass pipes underneath it, but this one requires five supporting pillars, so heavy are its bones, so long its chain of vertebrae. Upon these pillars, the professors assemble the sea cow, tying the spine together with strong metal wire and attaching the head to the atlas vertebra. Miss Olsonsoon completes her own work too. All that is missing is the final image, the complete skeleton viewed from the side, but for this she must wait until the scientists have erected the animal in full. She has spent three weeks staring at various parts of the sea cow, concentrating her efforts on the vertebrae and the ribs, and now the parts all come together and the whole animal comes into view in front of her, one piece at a time.
With that, her work is done. She collects all the drawings she has made and takes them to the professor for approval. Von Nordmann goes through the sketches and nods with satisfaction. He truly has an excellent assistant, as skilled with bones as she is with insects, and he sends the sketches off to the publisher. But there is a problem. Miss Olson has chosen to draw the complete sea cow at a scale of 1:15, but this means the image is too big to fit on the page. There is no time to make another drawing, so the printers attach a larger page at the end of the book on which they reproduce the drawing of the complete sea cow, and this page is then folded neatly inside. Von Nordmann smiles to himself. He could not have imagined a better way to remind readers of the sheer magnitude of the animal they are reading about, so large that it does not fit onto the pages of a book – even after being considerably shrunk. Now scholars from far-off lands can read his presentation and flick through the skeleton like a book. First the individual parts, the vertebrae, the ribs and skull, then finally they can unfold the page at the back and see the sea cow in full, spread the image out in front of them, imagine its scale and admire the enormous, beautiful creature that Hilda Olson has drawn for them.
In his presentation of the sea cow, von Nordmann introduced the Finnish scientific community to the notion of human-driven extinction. Unlike so many others, he believed Sauer’s account of what had happened. To von Nordmann, the idea of species disappearing was familiar and natural. In his younger days, he had run the botanical gardens in Odesa, and during his tenure a fascinating system of caves was discovered underneath the city. Von Nordmann ventured deep into the earth, crawling along damp, dusty tunnels, and these caves, which had lain untouched for millennia, revealed thousands of animal bones. And what animals they were! He uncovered one creature after another and carried the remains of these forgotten beasts up to the surface, the long-toothed skulls of cave hyenas, lions and bears. He published a study on the fossils of the Ukraine, remnants of species that had long since ceased to exist, and he cannot think of any reason why the possibility of such destruction should be limited to prehistory. Nature does not change its habits. He does not hold out hope. As he sees it, the sea cow is gone forever, just like the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros before it.
But many people are not yet ready to believe that human beings could drive another species to extinction. A full three decades after von Nordmann’s study was published, Rudyard Kipling includes inThe Jungle Booka story about a white seal that finds a sea cow on a secret island, a safe haven where the two have fled to avoid humancontact. Not an altogether unreasonable idea. In what remains of the isthmus of Beringia, the mammoth survives long after its conspecifics have headed elsewhere, and while humans erect the Pyramids, the woolly mammoth continues to graze, cut off on its islands. The sea cow lives on in its sanctuary for millennia after the mammoths are gone, but gradually it becomes clear that man has discovered their island, that their hiding place was revealed the moment Bering and his crew set their boots in the sand of the blue foxes’ island.
Hilda Olson is walking along one of the sandy paths running through the botanical gardens. The burnet roses are in full bloom, and she enjoys the fragrances, the hum of bumblebees visiting the flowers. She has been putting the finishing touches to her most recent sketches of spiders native to the Åland Islands and has come to the gardens to bring the professor her work, but it is not the housekeeper who opens the door but the professor’s daughter. She can see the news on Matilda’s face before she even opens her mouth.
