"Beginning with Bartram and his son William, who for forty years collected plants for export to the English Gardener Peter Collinson, the book centres on the lives and works of Charles Willson Peale who founded the Philadelphia Museum, the great show-man Phineas T Barnum, the painter Audubon and the zoologist Louis Agassiz with his student William James."
- Juliet Clutton-Brock, Nature Magazine