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 scientist's log, his remarkable dedication to the challenges of exploration and his deep appreciation of the beauty and rhythms of the world of river and rainforest shine through in his writing. Although he finally confessed that the contemplation of Nature alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart, his record of the time he passed in the Garden of Eden offers timely inspiration to our time. Stanfords Travel Classics feature some of the finest historical travel writing in the English language, with authors hailing from both sides of the Atlantic. Every title has been rest in a contemporary typeface and has been printed to a high quality production specification, to create a series that every lover of fine travel literature will want to collect and keep.