Reading “The Orchid Thief” stirred a few interesting thoughts in my head. First, it presented the late 19th and early 20th century collectors in a new light, one that allowed us to see them more as individuals with personal motivations. Orchid hunters provide an excellent example of these great adventurers as they were motivated by nothing more than the hunt and its prize. These are not explorers seeking to add their names to the annals of history, seeking exotic cultures and locales for which to pad their stories back home. No, the orchid hunters did not think of the culture, or location itself, as the exotic end in itself; these were places that actually made more sense to the hunter than his home in Europe. These men sought the most dangerous prize in the most fabulous places for the joy of the hunt, and the beauty that they were rewarded with. To read that many of them died, or chose to live on afterward, in the places that they explored was reminiscent of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, in that it was specified that Akeley himself was buried on the slope of a volcano pictured in the diorama behind his gorillas. To think of him as a man who so valued the location in which he shot these gorillas that he chose to be buried there puts him very much within the realm of the orchid hunter; he collected this specimens out of a desire for their beauty, and a lack of a better way to preserve it. In both cases, this desire for natural beauty leads very nearly to its destruction, but as with any obsession, one can become carried away. It would be easy to accuse men in both positions of disrespecting nature, but given the rapidly changing state of the modern world at the time, they were far closer to men seeking any sort of beauty that still made sense, and holding on to it as hard as they could.