Roget and his lists

American journalist, Joshua Kendall wrote a biography of the most famous list maker and author of a thesaurus, Peter Mark Roget. A London-born polymath who trained as a physician,Roget was best known in his day for his respected treatises on the classification of plants and animals. He even laid the theoretical groundwork for the invention of movies, having 'discovered' the eye's tendency to perceive a series of still images as being in motion.

Roget began the lengthy word lists that evolved into his thesaurus as an 8-year old, although the book's first edition was not published until he was 73. (Roget lived to the age of 90.)

Kendall wrote about a person who certainly was a gift to writers but not a person of great historical significance and who himself felt that his autobiography was a list. It is probably worth a read. http://www.themanwhomadelists.com/