Although this section is essentially a reference resource, the writing is smooth and fresh, and to read it straight through is to gain a textured sense of what that abstraction, biological diversity, really entails. They were probably small creatures resembling modern blind snakes, he suspects, adapted for a humble life of burrowing and a diet of insects and worms. How to defend against predators. But you can find the explanations in Greene's text, and you can see them made flesh in the Fogden photos. I don't think so.
Life is short, but snakes are long.
David Quammen's most recent book, ''The Song of the Dodo,'' received the 1997 Burroughs Medal for nature writing and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award for Journalism.