万物简史(MP3+中英字幕) 第678期:一个星球,一次实验(8)
日期:2020-04-27 09:22

(单词翻译:单击)

And where would you go to see poor Inca now?
现在你去哪里看望可怜的印加呢?
Nobody knows. The zoo lost it.
谁也不知道,因为动物园把那个标本弄丢了。
What is both most intriguing and puzzling about the story above is that Peale was a lover of birds,
上述故事中最令人费解和吃惊之处在于,作为一个热爱鸟类的人,
and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.
皮尔居然毫不迟疑地打死了数量众多的鹦鹉。他这样做没有任何原因,仅仅是出于兴趣。
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.
很长一段时间以来,那些对世界上的生物有着最强烈兴趣的人-往往就是最可能造成它们灭亡的人。这是一个令人震惊的事实。
No one represented this position on a larger scale (in every sense) than Lionel Walter Rothschild, the second Baron Rothschild.
在这方面最典型的一个例子(无论从哪种意义上讲)就是莱昂内尔.沃尔特.罗特希尔德,即罗特希尔德男爵二世。
Scion of the great banking family, Rothschild was a strange and reclusive fellow.
作为一个极其富有的银行家家族的后裔,罗特希尔德是一个性情怪僻、离群索居的人。
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)都是在白金汉郡特林镇他们家厢房的育儿室里度过的,使用的家具也都是他从小就一直使用的
even sleeping in his childhood bed, though eventually he weighed three hundred pounds.
甚至他睡的床也是他小时候睡的幼儿床,尽管他的体重最后重达135千克。

出于兴趣.jpg


His passion was natural history and he became a devoted accumulator of objects.
他感兴趣的是自然史,并且成了一个狂热的标本收藏家。
He sent hordes of trained men—as many as four hundred at a time—to every quarter of the globe to clamber over mountains
他派遣了大批训练有素的人员——一次多达400人——到地球的每一个角落,他们翻山越岭,
and hack their way through jungles in the pursuit of new specimens—particularly things that flew.
披荆斩棘,为的就是寻找新的标本——尤其是飞翔物的标本。
These were crated or boxed up and sent back to Rothschild's estate at Tring,
他们将收集而来的标本装箱或打包寄到罗特希尔德在特林镇的庄园。
where he and a battalion of assistants exhaustively logged and analyzed everything that came before them,
收到这些标本以后,罗特希尔德和他的一帮助手开始分门别类进行详尽的登记和研究。
producing a constant stream of books, papers, and monographs—some twelve hundred in all.
在此基础之上,他出版了一系列的书籍、文集和论文——总计达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.
罗特希尔德的自然史车间加工了200多万件标本,为科学资料库增添了5000多个新品种。

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