When a new moss is found it must be compared with all other mosses to make sure that it hasn't been recorded already. Then a formal description must be written and illustrations prepared and the result published in a respectable journal. The whole process seldom takes less than six months. The twentieth century was not a great age for moss taxonomy. Much of the century's work was devoted to untangling the confusions and duplications left behind by the nineteenth century.
要是发现了一种新的苔藓，就要把它和所有别的苔藓进行比较，看看是不是已经有过记录。接着，你就要写出正确的描述，准备好插图，把结果刊登在体面的杂志上。对于苔藓分类学来说，20世纪算不上是个丰收时代。该世纪昀许多工夫都花在清理l9世纪留下的混乱和重复的摊子上。

That was the golden age of moss collecting. (You may recall that Charles Lyell's father was a great moss man.) One aptly named Englishman, George Hunt, hunted British mosses so assiduously that he probably contributed to the extinction of several species. But it is thanks to such efforts that Len Ellis's collection is one of the world's most comprehensive. All 780,000 of his specimens are pressed into large folded sheets of heavy paper, some very old and covered with spidery Victorian script. Some, for all we knew, might have been in the hand of Robert Brown, the great Victorian botanist, unveiler of Brownian motion and the nucleus of cells, who founded and ran the museum's botany department for its first thirty-one years until his death in 1858. All the specimens are kept in lustrous old mahogany cabinets so strikingly fine that I remarked upon them.
那是个采集苔藓的黄金时代。（你也许还记得，查尔斯·莱尔的父亲就是个研究苔藓的大人物。）有个名叫乔治·亨特的英国人孜孜不倦地寻找英国的苔藓，他很可能为几种苔藓的灭绝起了作用。但是。多亏了这样的努力，莱恩·埃利斯的收藏品才成为世界上最全的收藏品之一。他总共有78万件标本，压在又大又厚的纸本里。有的非常古老，维多利亚时代的人在上面蛛丝般地写满了说明，就我们所知，有些可能是罗伯特·布朗的手迹。布朗是维多利亚时代伟大的植物学家，曾揭示布朗运动和细胞核。他创建了该博物馆的植物部，并在最初的31年里主持这个部门，直到他1858年去世。所有的标本都保存在油光光的旧红木框子里。这些柜子非常精美，我谈了几句看法。
Oh, those were Sir Joseph Banks's, from his house in Soho Square, Ellis said casually, as if identifying a recent purchase from Ikea. "He had them built to hold his specimens from the Endeavour voyage." He regarded the cabinets thoughtfully, as if for the first time in a long while. "I don't know howwe ended up with them in bryology," he added.
“哦，那是约瑟夫·班克斯爵士的东西，是从他在索荷广场的家里搬来的。”埃利斯漫不经心地说，仿佛是在鉴定刚从宜家家居买来的家具，“他做这些柜子是为了存放从‘奋进’号航行中搜集来的标本。”他若有所思地打量着那些柜子，好像是很长时间以来第一次看到，“我不知道我们最后怎么在苔藓学领域跟它们打上了交道。”他接着说。