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Cover Legend: "The Striped Globe", engraving with original hand coloring—from Marcus Elieser Bloch's Ichthyologie, Ou Histoire Naturelle, Generale Et Particuliere, Des Poissons, Paris and Berlin, 1782-95 (courtesy of The Philadelphia Print Shop, Ltd., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA). Marcus Elieser Bloch (1723-1799) is considered one of the most important ichthyologists of the 18th century. He was also one of the first Jews permitted to practice medicine in Prussia. Bloch was reared in rural Anspach in a traditional, religious family, moving to cosmopolitan Berlin for his higher education. In Frederick the Great's Prussia, he was blocked from university studies in science, but was permitted to become a practicing doctor. He soon became part of the intellectual circle (and personal physician) of the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1728-86). The Berlin group was greatly influenced by the Enlightenment philosophers of France, Sweden, and The Netherlands and sought entry into the modern world via "the study of nature and of nature's rules." At age 56, Bloch embarked on a magnum opus. The insights of Linnean binomial taxonomy had led to a flowering of research in ichthyology as natural scientists traveled the globe to classify and name new genera and species. As part of this effort, which we might call the "Global Phenome Project", Bloch collected over 1400 ichthyological specimens, commissioning hand-colored engravings from the artists Johan Friedrich August Krueger and Johan Friedrich Henning. Between 1782 and 1795 he published his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische. The work, a breathtaking masterpiece of Enlightenment art and science, was conceived as a biological counterpart to Diderot's Encyclopedie, and was published simultaneously in Paris and Berlin. The first three volumes describe fishes of Germany, the Oeconomische Naturgeschichte der Fische Deutschlands, drawn from freshly observed species, followed by nine volumes of foreign fishes, drawn from various stages of preserved samples, the Naturgeschichte der ausländischen Fische. The natural scientists of the Global Phenome Project (i.e., Linnaeus, Buffon, and Bloch) would have been pleased to see the uses made of their work by modern genome scientists: the modeling of a human condition in the genes of fish.