The Naturalist on the River Amazons

Henry Walter Bates and his co-naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace embarked together in 1848 on an expedition to the forests of the Amazon in search of plants and animals that would help solve the problem of the origin of species. Wallace returned to England in 1852, but tragically lost his entire collection in a shipwreck. The Naturalist on the River Amazons was published in 1863 and catalogs a wondrous range of natural life in vivid description and detail. But Bates' book is much more than a sc…