Richard

One immediately drops to the ground, takes off his hiking boots, and starts putting on his running shoes. The other says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear!” His friend replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you!”

Sometimes misfortunes suffered by others satisfy our sense of justice.

As long as people were smart and strong enough to procure food and shelter, they would have needed no greater talents—nor would they have felt lacking.

When our self-esteem is shaky, comparing ourselves with someone inferior can help us feel better.

‘A Sort of Tea from China’, c. 1700, a material survival of Britain’s encounter with tea in the late seventeenth century. e specimen was acquired by James Cuninghame, a physician and ship’s surgeon who visited Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698–9 and Chusan (Zhoushan) in 1700–1703.

We encounter ‘Vegetable Substance 857’ on a visit to the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum in London.

Today, the Vegetable Substances share a section of the Darwin Centre’s eighth floor with Sloane’s vast herbarium, also known as a hortus siccus or ‘dried garden’.

His method was to store items of botanical interest such as seeds and fruits, as well as vegetable products in which he perceived potential utility for trade or medicine. e Vegetable Substances, spectacular in their range, were nonetheless just one component of Sloane’s trove of antiquities, books and natural rarities – all bequeathed to the public as the inaugurating repository of the British Museum (and later the British Library and Natural History Museum).

Its samples 7
e m p i r e o f t e a
of flowers and leaves were dispatched from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas before being mounted and pressed in London into leather-bound folios (each of which now claims its own Perspex-enclosed shelf).

Further investigation among Sloane’s correspondence and scientific papers at the British Library confirms that this is James Cuninghame (d. 1709), a Scottish ship’s surgeon who twice travelled to China. It is not clear whether this tea is the produce of the hill country of Fujian, acquired when Cuninghame joined a private trading voyage to Amoy (Xiamen) in 1698, or the local manufacture of Chusan (Zhoushan), where Cuninghame accompanied an abortive East India Company