Excerpt from Heroes of Science: Botanists, Zoologists, and Geologists There is no little difficulty in obtaining correct and reliable life histories of most of the greatest naturalists. Many of the men to whom natural history science owes so much, lived extremely retired and uneventful lives; but a few, and as might have been anticipated, the reformers and epoch makers of their respective sciences, have had their most interesting biographies well written. Abstracts of these biographies form a large portion of this book; and the author desires to acknowledge the very copious extracts he has made, from sources which he has recognized in the proper places. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.