By the nineteenth century curiosity had changed. It might have been the moment when cynicism was born. The Industrial Revolution was proving that not all man-made advances were perfect and many could be awful. Alfred Wallace, a colleague of Darwin’s, once noted that the English working class lived in squalor unknown to the “primitives” he studied in the Amazon. Nature by contrast seemed pure and bewitching. The great travelers turned away from civilization and went to explore the wild world.
