"David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. But chaos seemed out to get him. His fish collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake-which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life's work was shattered. But instead of giving it to despair, Jordan introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.
