Print this article Color illustration depicting four Red-bellied woodpeckers, Melanerpes carolinus or Centurus carolinus (Linnaeus), with two females perched on the lower branch of a woody tree and two males above, one perched on a branch, the other perched on the aperture of a hole in the trunk, from the volume "Birds of America, " authored by T Gilbert (Thomas Gilbert) Pearson, 1923. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) We used to love putting labels on things. Of course, it started in a garden, a hotbed of growth and mutation: “And the Lord God caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food ... [and] fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.” After Adam came Noah, the floating zoologist, another ready inspiration to collectors and classifiers such Carl Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, and Charles Darwin. But how far we are fallen since the golden age of natural curiosity. Half a century ago, in