The Naturalists: Scientific Travelers in the Golden Age of Natural History

This volume provides portraits of the early naturalists who explored the New World in the pre-Darwinian Age. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe and America saw the dawn of a golden age of science in which society energetically sought to quantify, categorize, and rationally explain the world. The author profiles nine important naturalists -- both dedicated professionals and amateurs -- who set off for what is now North and South America to discover and document the natural wonders they found there. Their stories of adventure are punctuated with hardship, both in finding the financing to get their ventures off the ground, and the vagaries of the elements they encountered in the New World. Despite the odds, these explorers, either traveling with artists, or as artists themselves, chronicled their adventures in both words and pictures, providing a unique portrait of the natural world in North, South, and Central America before parts of it became widely settled.