The founding of the British Museum in 1753 came hot on the heels of the opening of the Luxembourg palace in 1750, the first public art gallery in France. But even earlier, the Enlightenment encyclopedic approach to the acquisition and classification of knowledge was manifest in cabinets of curiosities (such as Peter the Great's in St. Petersburg, which proudly possessed the largest and most famous collection of ''monsters''), or the archaeological and artistic collections that generated a thriving commercial economy in Italian cities, where dealers, dilettanti, connoisseurs, aesthetes, and antiquarians busily traded in enlightened taste.

As a descriptive science of forms and categories, natural history complemented mechanical philosophy by merging the living and the nonliving, banishing spirits and metaphysics in favor of empirical methods of classification, often based on external characteristics (such as Linnaeus's use of the sexual organs of plants to classify groups down to the level of species), with the famous exception of Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), who attempted to classify the whole of the natural world in his massive Histoire naturelle (1749-1804) using a uniquely historical approach (evidence from the fossil record, for example) and a theory of reproductive relationships to create a biological classification system. In either case, despite their epistemological differences, recognizing patterns in nature was thought to be the key to understanding not only its operations but its organization, embracing the Enlightenment commitment to render the secrets of nature visible and to display its magisterial order openly to the public.

One Enlightenment pursuit was to set out to catalog nature's diversity, with its contents named and classified accordingly. When Enlightenment pursuits turned to collecting exemplary specimens, the natural history community was vigorously mobilized. And one view of the ''geography'' of the Enlightenment appears expansive--Russia recruited naturalists particularly from France, Germany, and the Netherlands to help explore its vast natural resources; the Uppsala Royal Society sponsored various expeditions to the polar regions; and Linnaeus gave his pupils specific instructions for collecting specimens and recording information during their worldwide travels, a procedure later imitated by the president of the Royal Society in London, Sir Joseph Banks, when promoting voyages of exploration. Even if everything collected could not be comfortably classified (in an epoch of standardized descriptions, how does one account for ''monsters''?), natural historical knowledge was considered useful because it summed up the Adamic process of establishing order from the confusion of the natural world. . .

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