This sumptuous volume reveals the lives of some of history's greatest explorers of the natural world, using the specimens they collected, the letters they wrote and the art they created to record their discoveries. Superb artworks and photographs spanning three centuries have been specially chosen to illustrate each essay and many are published here for the first time. Their findings revolutionised our understanding of nature and gave birth to the modern fields of geography, evolutionary biology, oceanography and anthropology. From ground-breaking theorists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to evocative artists like Ferdinand Bauer and John James Audubon, these explorers shared an ambition to illuminate new worlds and each embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.