<b>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 of <i>A Sense of the World</i></b> <p/><b>"[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving."--Dava Sobel, author of <i>Longitude</i></b> <p/>In 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 possibly hold more than a few thousand species--or as many could fit on Noah's Ark? <p/>Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as <i>mammal, primate, </i> and <i>Homo sapiens, </i> but he also denied that species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of the