That great beast of a town: in the 1770s, London became the epicenter for a great intellectual quest: discovering the incredible diversity of life on Earth

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WHY THIS SUDDEN outburst of passion for the natural world? For more than a thousand years, nature had been locked away behind moral lessons and mythology. The Church, devoted to knowing the mind of God, had turned its back on nature. Common knowledge even about native European plants and animals had been handed down uncritically for centuries from Roman authors and medieval bestiaries full of imaginary creatures. So when the scientific revolution finally provided release from the fixed, allegorical medieval cosmos, people began to see nature as if for the first time.

In England, the natural philosopher Isaac Newton had devised a new way of looking at the world in terms of astronomy, mathematics, and physics. The philosopher Francis Bacon had popularized the idea that knowing the Creation was the way to know God and to recover the intimate dominion over Nature lost at the gate of the Garden of Eden. A 1765 letter to London from Dr. Alexander Garden, a South Carolina naturalist, suggests that, after a century's gestation, this idea was now in full blossom. An ardent disciple of Linnaeus, Garden first griped about a rival stealing a species that he himself had actually discovered. But then he relented: "Yet, after all, he is an excellent man and I forgive him, because it is a matter of little moment who declares the glories of God, provided only they are not passed over in silence."

Some tradition-bound geographers still populated blank regions on their maps with such imaginary monsters as manticores (a blend of lion, scorpion, and human) and blemmies (headless humans whose faces were incorporated in their chests). But travelers were now actually visiting the farthest corners of the planet and discovering what really lived there. Linnaeus had provided the tools for bringing order to the overwhelming diversity they encountered. His system of classification made it possible to take any living thing, give it a simple name (like Homo sapiens), and place it in a neat hierarchy by species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom.

While not everyone could understand Newtonian physics, anyone could now approach the natural world, and for a time, according to the historian of science John R.R. Christie, almost everyone did--men and women, clergy and merchants, aristocrats and gardeners' boys. Studying nature required explorers willing to face the likelihood of death in some unknown land and also homebodies who could sit still and record minute details of natural behavior. It called for practical types skilled at hunting, drying, and stuffing, and also philosophical sorts who could make subtle distinctions about what connected different animals and what separated them. The new discipline required scholars trained to use the complex vocabulary of scientific description to name, classify, and describe the natural world. But it also required artists and writers who could bring new species to life for ordinary readers.