There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.

How we organise such collections tells us much about how we think about the natural world and the mental structures we use to do so. A great many of these concepts, particularly that of species, have their foundations in the work of two famous men: Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-88). All students of biology have heard of Linnaeus and his conception of binomial classification, but fewer will be familiar with the contribution of the great naturalist Buffon, who dominated eighteenth-century natural science in France. In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts rectifies this imbalance, weaving a compelling and engaging narrative of these two men who never met and yet whose intertwined work laid the foundations for the study of life itself.