The Naturalist Who Fell to His Knees

In 1831, a young Charles Darwin stepped off the HMS Beagle onto the shores of Brazil and walked into a tropical rainforest for the first time. What he encountered left him nearly speechless. In his journal, he struggled to capture the overwhelming variety of life surrounding him — iridescent beetles, towering ferns, birds whose plumage defied description, fungi in colors he had never imagined.…