Every Living Thing : The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts

The dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different.

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, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible--how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal.