“An inordinate fondness for beetles.” So J.B.S. Haldane famously quipped when asked what he thought could be deduced about God through the study of natural history. He had a point. There are 380,000 (give or take) species presently known to science – with untold thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, still undiscovered and not yet described.
As most naturalists do, I like to stop for at least a few moments on anniversaries of particular scientific significance in order to acknowledge and contemplate what or who that anniversary commemorates and where we would be had that thing not happened or that person not been born. Such a day is 12 February, the date on which Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZS was born.