A Colorful History Of The Early Naturalists Who Risked Death To Discover Strange Life-Forms At The Ends Of The Earth.Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, amateur naturalists with more swagger than scientific training made it their mission to go to the most perilous corners of the planet and bring back astonishing new species. Linnaeus, Darwin, and Wallace dominate most histories of the great age of discovery, but they owed their success to this eccentric network of enthusiastsùamong them a grave-robbing anatomist who became the model for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a Catholic missionary who held off bandits at gunpoint, and a British ornithologist who lost his left arm by jamming it down the throat of a charging leopard, but happily lived on to play a good game of tennis.The Species Seekers takes us back in timeùbefore the words "scientist" or "biologist" even existedùto an era when a popular fever for the natural world swept through humanity. Discovering new species wasn't a rarefied pastime; it was a pandemic, a social disease that struck every corner of society, claiming such notables as Thomas Jefferson, who laid out mastodon bones on the floor of the White House, and Mark Twain, who wanted to explore the Amazon but went bust in New Orleans and had to make do with the river at hand.Amid its tales of adventure and intrigue, The Species Seekers offers unmatched insight into one of the great revolutions in the history of human thought. At the start, God was in heaven, man was the center of the universe, and everyone accepted that the Earth had been born yesterday for our benefit. But we weren't sure where vegetable ended and animal began. We didn't know what species were, or that they could be joined by common origin. We had no method of identifying the causes of the pestilential diseases that made death a constant companion.All that suddenly changed as the species seekers introduced us to the pantheon of life on Earthùand our place within it. Read Less