An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth—a competition whose consequences still reverberate today—from the bestselling author ofA Sense of the World“[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving.”—Dava Sobel, author ofLongitudeIn the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster’s flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France’s royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet...