| Description |
269 pages : 8 plates, illustrations, maps, portraits ; 21 cm |
| Series |
Great travellers |
|
Great travellers.
|
| Contents |
Preface -- I The hosier's apprentice -- II Escape from England -- III Preparations in Pará -- IV Journey to the Tocantins -- V Caripí and Cametá -- VI To the upper Amazons -- VII The entomologist's eden -- VIII Santarem and the Tapajos -- IX Last journeys -- X In Darwin's shadow -- Acknowledgements and select bibliography -- Index |
| Summary |
Henry Walter Bates was one of the great self-taught naturalists of the Victorian age. Trained, as a hosier, with litte formal education, he became in boyhood a dedicated entomologist. His meeting in 1844 with the equally delf-taught young naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was decisive in the lives of both men. Together they decided to embark on careers as field naturalists, and together they set off in 1848 - almost penniless - to the Amazons. After a short time they parted company; Bates stayed on the Amazons and its tributaries for eleven years, returning to England in 1859. Living by selling his specimens to English museums, he travelled in many localities unknown to European scientists, mingled with primitive Indian tribes, and when he returned to England had discovered no less than 8,000 hitherto unknown species of insects, birds, mammals and other forms of animal life. Bates not only wrote an admirable account of his travels - The Naturalist on the River Amazons, which fives an inimitable picture of life on the great river. He also became an important minor evolutionist, and a close friend of Charles Darwin; he was the first naturalist to study and explain the remarkable phenomenon of mimicry among insects. Using letters, journals and other contemporary material to support the account Bates gave in his book, George Woodcokc, himself the author of travel books on Asia and the Americas, has reconstructed this fascinating episode in the history of travel and of science. (Inside cover) |
| Notes |
Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Bibliography: pages 262-264 |
| Subject |
Bates, Henry Walter, 1825-1892.
|
|
Amazon River -- Description and travel -- History.
|
| Genre/Form |
Biographies.
|
| LC no. |
76412721 |
| ISBN |
0571088007 |
|
