The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once lamented that we kill things with the names we give to them. In several of his most famous poems he tried to see certain creatures - flamingos, a panther in a Paris zoo - as if in some imaginary Eden before Adam affixed labels to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. And around the same time the American poet Hart Crane, addressing the "moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page," dreamed of a day when all beings would stand in innocent anonymity, "struck free and holy in one name always." This is a beguiling proposition. But can we really see anything on earth without the filtering effect of words? And would we really want to? In fact, certain names not only capture but enhance the mystery that surrounds a thing. Could a wombat by any other name - however sweet it smelled - be truly a wombat?

As a child poring over illustrated books of natural history I was as taken by the exotic names of unfamiliar animals as by the plates that depicted them. The boomslang seemed deadlier, the bandicoot more mischievous, the quoll and the hyrax more enigmatic, because of the names they bore. Who would want to inhabit a world in which the kookaburra and the hoatzin clucked and squawked anonymously? Their very names announce them. We know that once there was a speechless time when all things lacked names, but it remains unimaginable to us, and perhaps properly so.

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