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.
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