Today, if you want to know about any of the flo­ra or fau­na that sur­round us, you have only to look it up online. After you get your fill of knowl­edge, you can decide whether or not you want to ven­ture out into the world and see your object of inter­est in its nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment (or a con­trolled sim­u­la­tion there­of). In the Vic­to­ri­an era, things worked a bit dif­fer­ent­ly. Ide­al­ly, you’d have grown up in a house­hold, or at least had access to an insti­tu­tion, with the com­plete set of The Nat­u­ral­ist’s Library , a series of more than 40 vol­umes on every­thing from the birds and the bees to the quadrupeds and the mar­su­pi­alia.…