United States, Travel, Nature & Ecology 

"For the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge." The familiar phrase, the founding mission statement of the National Geographic Society, appears each month on the masthead of its magazine. But increasing and diffusing knowledge costs money, and for more than a hundred years the funds that have supported the research and exploration arm of the Society have come chiefly from the dues of its members."Millionaire and college professor, captain of industry and clerk," in the phrase of early Society President Gilbert H. Grosvenor, have had "an equal share" in financing expeditions.Unlocking Secrets of the Unknown with National Geographic chronicles the results of some of the thousands of research grants awarded since 1890. Through its pages march familiar names: Beebe, Goodall, Fossey, Bass, the Leakeys and the Craigheads, Cousteau. And exotic, often faraway places: Machu Picchu, Borneo, Rwanda, Herculaneum - "a time capsule for posterity" - Pueblo Bonito, Chan Chan, Tibet, the Galapagos.Whale songs and wolf howls resonate through the book. Elephants rumble and loons wail. Grizzlies and black-footed ferrets appear. The strobes of "Papa Flash" Edgerton light up the undersea world, and paleontologists endure blazing sun to scrape away the dust of millennia in their search for mankind's earliest ancestors.Geographic funding has placed scientists in the rarefied air atop Mount Everest and among the cold bones of ancient shipwrecks beneath the surface of the Mediterranean Sea.While this book was being prepared, the 5,000th research grant was awarded - fittingly, to a young woman studying chimpanzees in Africa. And the work goes on. Unlocking Secrets is a tribute not only to the scientists who do the work but also to the members of the Society who support it. - from Amzon