IF YOU have ever visited a museum and stood in front of a glass cabinet stuffed with exotic creatures, you have made a connection with The Species Seekers. Those specimens were probably discovered, preserved, exhibited and classified by some of the myriad characters that populate this book. Starting at a time when the natural world was a terra incognita populated by dragons, these heroic, foolish and vainglorious individuals did not simply catalogue what was out there, they changed our understanding of life on Earth.
Richard Conniff brilliantly conveys the deprivation and squalor endured by the explorers, the intellectual jostling…
