page_title: The Naturalist on the River Amazons
section_title: Charles Darwin
hierarchical_section_title: The Naturalist on the River Amazons / Reception / Contemporary reviews / Charles Darwin
context_page_description: The Naturalist on the River Amazons, subtitled A Record of the Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel, is an 1863 book by the British naturalist Henry Walter Bates about his expedition to the Amazon basin. Bates and his friend Alfred Russel Wallace set out to obtain new species and new evidence for evolution by natural selection, as well as exotic specimens to sell. He explored thousands of miles of the Amazon and its tributaries, and collected over 14,000 species, of which 8,000 were new to science. His observations of the coloration of butterflies led him to discover Batesian mimicry.
  The book contains an evenly distributed mixture of natural history, travel, and observation of human societies, including the towns with their Catholic processions. Only the most remarkable discoveries of animals and plants are described, and theories such as evolution and mimicry are barely mentioned. Bates remarks that finding a new species is only the start; he also describes animal behaviour, sometimes in detail, as for the army ants.
context_section_description: Charles Darwin, having encouraged Bates to publish an account of his travels, read The Naturalist on the River Amazons with great pleasure, writing to Bates on 18 April 1863 that
  My criticisms may be condensed into a single sentence, namely that it is the best book of Natural History Travels ever published in England. Your style seems to me admirable. Nothing can be better than the discussion on the struggle for existence & nothing better than the descriptions on the Forest scenery. It is a grand book, & whether or not it sells quickly it will last. You have spoken out boldly on Species; & boldness on this subject seems to get rarer & rarer.— How beautifully illustrated it is. The cut on the back is most tasteful. I heartily congratulate you on its publication.
  — Charles Darwin
  Darwin noted in his letter that Athenaeum magazine reviewed the book coldly and insolently, while the Reader received it warmly. Darwin published An Appreciation of the book in the Natural History Review in 1863, in which he notes that Bates sent back "a mass of specimens" of "no less than 14,712 species" (mostly of insects), of which 8000 were new to science. Darwin at once observes that although Bates is "no mean authority" on insects, the book is not limited to them, but ranges over natural history and more widely to describe his "adventures during his journeyings up and down the mighty river". Darwin clearly enjoyed Bates's account of the hyacinthine macaw, calling it a "splendid bird" with its "enormous beak" able to feed on mucuja palm nuts, and quoting Bates: "which are so hard as to be difficult to break with a heavy hammer, are crushed to a pulp by the powerful beak of this Macaw." Darwin took the opportunity to hit back at the Athenaeum magazine which had criticised Bates's book, at the same time painting a picture of Bates's lonely life in the rainforest:
  Mr. Bates must indeed have been driven to great straits as regards his mental food, when, as he tells us, he took to reading the Athenaeum three times over, "the first time devouring the more interesting articles—the second, the whole of the remainder—and the third, reading all the advertisements from beginning to end.
  — Charles Darwin
  Darwin notes that "We need hardly say that Mr. Bates... is a zealous advocate of the hypothesis of the origin of species by derivation from a common stock", in other words that Bates was a staunch Darwinian. Darwin was happy to have the Naturalist on his side, and to use the book in the Origin of Species debate which was still heated in 1863. In particular, Darwin was struck by Bates's robust evidence of mimicry in "the Butterflies of the genus Heliconius". Here Darwin quotes nearly a whole page from Bates's conclusions, including Bates's view of his own findings that hint at speciation actually in progress:
  The facts just given are therefore of some scientific importance, for they tend to show that a physiological species can be and is produced in nature out of the varieties of a pre-existing closely allied one. This is not an isolated case... But in very few has it happened that the species which clearly appears to be the parent, co-exists with one that has been evidently derived from it.
  — Charles Darwin
caption: Hyacinthine macaws in a palm tree in the Pantanal, Brazil
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