Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century

Using a variety of methods to gather and classify their burgeoning knowledge of the world, these pioneering studies of nature and man became the foundations for our modern understanding of the world and gave birth to countless new disciples - from palaeontology, archaeology and ethnography to the history of art. This book charts man's voyage of intellectual discovery by permitting the collectors and their collections to speak for their century, just as the books on the shelves of the original King's Library once did.