No matter who we are, old or young, fashion conscious or style indifferent, we are all aware of hair. To a nineteenth-century amateur naturalist named Peter A. Browne, hair was the single physical attribute that could unravel the mystery of human evolution.

Thirty years before Charles Darwin revolutionized understanding of the descent of man, Browne collected hair from as wide a variety of humans and animals as possible in his quest to account for the differences and similarities between groups of humans. The result of his diligent, all-consuming specimen-collecting passion is a fastidious, artfully assembled twelve-volume archive of mammalian diversity kept in the archives of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia since the mid-1800s.

By the time of his death in 1860, Browne had assembled samples from innumerable wild and domestic animals, as well as the largest known study collection of human hair hair from people from all parts of the globe and all walks of life: artists, scientists, abolitionist ministers, doctors, writers, politicians, financiers, military leaders, and even prisoners, sideshow performers, and lunatics. His crowning achievement was a gathering of hair from thirteen of the first fourteen presidents of the United States. The pages of his albums are distinctly idiosyncratic, captivating, and powerfully evocative of a vanished world.

Browne’s albums narrowly escaped destruction in the 1970s and remain a unique and fascinating manifestation of the avid collecting instinct in nineteenth-century scientific endeavors to explain the mysteries of the natural world.