First in the field: America's pioneering naturalists

One of the characteristics that sets man apart from all the creatures sharing this planet is the intensity of his curiosity about those creatures -- in fact, about all of the fauna and flora privileged or doomed to cohabit a small, crowded, endangered, yet incalculably rich environment called Earth. The pioneering naturalists were exemplars of that curiosity, sometimes timorous and fantasy-ridden, but often courageous and marked by genius.