Naturalists like the young Alfred Russel Wallace supported themselves entirely by collecting exotic specimens abroad and selling them to museums, wealthy private collectors and dealers back home — a genuine trade with its own market prices per bird or beetle. Conservation law, customs restrictions and the rise of salaried museum expedition staff gradually closed off freelance collecting as a way to make a living.
Professional specimen collector no longer exists as a living trade. Here is what erased it, and which profession took on the work.
1600s – 1859
Microscopes, cells and formal taxonomy
Improved microscopes revealed a hidden world of cells and microorganisms invisible to the naked eye, while Linnaeus's binomial system gave naturalists a shared language for organizing the explosion of new species colonial expeditions were bringing back from around the world, setting taxonomy on the footing it still uses today.
What else was happening then
1735
Linnaeus publishes Systema Naturae
Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae introduced a standardized two-part Latin name for every species and a nested hierarchy of ranks — kingdom, class, order, genus, species — replacing the long, inconsistent descriptive names naturalists had used before, a system still in use essentially unchanged.
1858–1859
Darwin and Wallace announce natural selection
After Alfred Russel Wallace independently sent Charles Darwin a manuscript outlining the same theory Darwin had held unpublished for two decades, their work was jointly read at London's Linnean Society in July 1858; Darwin's On the Origin of Species followed in November 1859.
1865–1866
Mendel presents the laws of inheritance
After eight years cross-breeding roughly 28,000 pea plants in his Brno monastery garden, Gregor Mendel presented statistical laws of inheritance to the local Natural History Society; published in 1866 in an obscure regional journal, the work went almost unread for 34 years.
1859–1864
Pasteur disproves spontaneous generation
Using sealed swan-neck flasks that let air in but kept out airborne dust and microbes, Louis Pasteur showed that sterilized broth stayed sterile indefinitely, disproving the ancient idea that living organisms spontaneously arise from non-living matter and laying groundwork for germ theory.
Where that work lives now
The scientist who studies life itself, from Linnaeus naming species by hand to editing genomes with CRISPR, still testing every idea against a living organism.
🧬 Biologist →