The collectors

The history of natural history can rarely have been as succinctly told as in
Paul Lawrence Farber’s 129-page Finding Order in Nature. From the
intellectual revolutions of Linnaeus and Darwin through the Victorian obsessions
with classifying and collecting, to the conservationists led by E. O. Wilson, it
is an odyssey beautifully told. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press,
£31, ISBN 0801863899.