It is also clear that the early-nineteenth-century floweringof collecting and naming resulted from the greater affordability oftransoceanic steam travel and from European imperial expansion andsettlement, especially in the rich tropical environments of the southernhemisphere. In North America, naturalists like John James Audubon~2followed the military frontier into the species-rich environmentsof the southeastern United States. And the western boundary andtransport surveys of the 1850s took naturalists like Spencer Baird13into the faunally diverse and virtually unworked areas of the AmericanWest. No one has tried to map the historical geography of taxonomicknowledge onto that of imperial expansion and settlement, but I wouldexpect a close correlation. If trade has followed flags, so also havenaturalists and collectors. Access was crucial: wherever improvedtransportation technology and colonial infrastructure afforded readyaccess to places previously expensive or dangerous to reach, there thepace of discovery of new species will soon pick up.
The third of these cycles of collecting——I have withoutfanfare been calling it "survey" collecting——is the least well knownand the most surprising. We do not think of the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries as being a great age of discovery in naturalhistory; but they were. One need only peruse the annual reports ofnational and civic museums to appreciate the enormous enthusiasmfor expeditions and collecting. In the United States alone dozens orscores of collecting expeditions were dispatched each year to thefar corners of the world between 1880 and 1930: hundreds in all, orthousands——perhaps as many as in the previous two hundred years ofscientific expeditioning. They certainly produced as much knowledgeof the worlds biodiversity as any of the earlier episodes of organizedcollecting.
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