Rivers, after all, normally rise in the mountains, flow down their slopes, gathering water from their tributary streams as they go, and then continue down to the plains. Tibet, which before the collision of the continents had been a well-watered plain along the southern edge of Asia, was not only pushed upwards but gradually deprived of its rainfall by the young mountains and so changed into the high cold desert that it is today; the upper reaches of the Kali Gandaki lost much of the rain that had given the river its initial erosive power and shrank inside its vast valley; and on the site of the ancient sea there now stood the highest and newest mountains in the world containing, within their fabric, the remains of ammonites. That project attempted to describe the way in which animals and plants developed on this planet over the past three thousand million years and traced the rise of different groups of animals, most recently the expansion of the mammals and the appearance of humans. I really enjoy stuff like geography and the natural world so learning about stuff like this is fascinating to me. The difficulties are not actually experienced by me, because the bits that I do are the easiest bits.

In this new edition, the author, with the help of zoologist Matthew Cobb, has added all the most up-to-date discoveries of ecology and biology.

Among them, if you are very lucky, you might see a little red panda, foxy brown with a furred black-ringed tail and a grizzled head, scrambling through the branches on the lookout for birds’ eggs or berries, insects or mice.

The series is available in the UK for Regions 2 and 4 as a 4-disc DVD set (BBCDVD1234, released 1 September 2003) and as part of The Life Collection. After a tropical storm, an aged kapok tree comes crashing to the ground, leaving a gap in the canopy above. It's well written, with some good photos, and not too jargon-laden for most readers to understand the text. However, the index has been compiled to serve as a glossary in which each organism is given not only a page reference but also its scientific name, so a reader who wishes to know precisely what family, genus or species is being referred to can discover by looking it up in the index.

Attenborough also highlights those species that have perfected the art of camouflage, including phasmids. To show the force of nature responsible for this, Attenborough stands in front of an erupting volcano in Iceland and handles a piece of basalt; the Giant's Causeway is an example of what happens to it over a great length of time. Single species, and often whole communities, adapt to make the most of ice cap and tundra, forest and plain, desert, ocean and volcano. However, before the latter, Attenborough wrote and presented two shorter series: The First Eden (1987), about man's relationship with the natural habitats of the Mediterranean, and Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989), concerning the discovery of fossils.

Those living on the high Tibetan plateau have a specific genetic adaptation affecting their blood which appears to have been acquired by mating with extinct forms of human in the long-distant past. Here, there is only just enough light for the pine trees to survive, but it is extremely cold during the winter.

Each of the continents had its own multitudinous complement of inhabitants, though India, having been isolated as an immense island since just after the decline of the reptiles, was undoubtedly much poorer in advanced groups of animals than Asia. As you stand in Nepal beside its roaring milky waters, looking upstream towards the main range of the Himalayas, the river seems to spring from a cluster of immense snow-capped, ice-girt peaks.