This was an interesting, scary, and somehow inspiring bit of historical information on the early naturalists. One of my favorite parts was a quote from one of the all-time greats, Alfred Russel Wallace.
“I trembled with excitement as I saw it coming majestically toward me,” Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, of a spectacular butterfly in the East Indies, “& could hardly believe I had really obtained it till I had taken it out my net and gazed upon its gorgeous wings of velvet black & brilliant green, its golden body & crimson breast … I have certainly never seen a more gorgeous insect.” Naturalists were also caught up body and soul in the great intellectual enterprise of collecting, classifying and coming to terms with the diversity of life on Earth.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/dying-for-discovery/
Ecology Journalism 