The Naturalist on the River Amazons | Page 5

twenty new species of
fishes, and many new and conspicuous insects, apparently peculiar to
this part of the Amazonian valley.
In a later chapter Mr. Bates commences his account of the Solimoens,
or Upper Amazons, on the banks of which he passed four years and a
half. The country is a "magnificent wilderness, where civilised man has,
as yet, scarcely obtained a footing-the cultivated ground, from the Rio
Negro to the Andes, amounting only to a few score acres." During the
whole of this time Mr. Bates' headquarters were at Ega, on the Teffe, a
confluent of the great river from the south, whence excursions were
made sometimes for 300 or 400 miles into the interior. In the intervals
Mr. Bates followed his pursuit as a collecting naturalist in the same
"peaceful, regular way," as he might have done in a European village.
Our author draws a most striking picture of the quiet, secluded life he
led in this far-distant spot. The difficulty of getting news and the want
of intellectual society were the great drawbacks--"the latter increasing
until it became almost insupportable." "I was obliged at last," Mr. Bates
naively remarks, "to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of
Nature, alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and mind." Mr.
Bates must indeed have been driven to great straits as regards his
mental food, when, as he tell 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."
Ega was, indeed, as Mr. Bates remarks, a fine field for a Natural
History collector, the only previous scientific visitants to that region
having been the German Naturalists, Spix and Martius, and the Count
de Castelnau when he descended the Amazons from the Pacific. Mr.
Bates' account of the monkeys of the genera Brachyuyus, Nyctipithecus
and Midas met with in this region, and the whole of the very pregnant
remarks which follow on the American forms of the Quadrumana, will
be read with interest by every one, particularly by those who pay

attention to the important subject of geographical distribution. We need
hardly say that Mr. Bates, after the attention he has bestowed upon this
question, is a zealous advocate of the hypothesis of the origin of
species by derivation from a common stock. After giving an outline of
the general distribution of Monkeys, he clearly argues that unless the
"common origin at least of the species of a family be admitted, the
problem of their distribution must remain an inexplicable mystery." Mr.
Bates evidently thoroughly understands the nature of this interesting
problem, and in another passage, in which the very singular distribution
of the Butterflies of the genus Heliconius is enlarged upon, concludes
with the following significant remarks upon this important subject:
"In the controversy which is being waged amongst Naturalists since the
publication of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species, it has been
rightly said that no proof at present existed of the production of a
physiological species, that is, a form which will not interbreed with the
one from which it was derived, although given ample opportunities of
doing so, and does not exhibit signs of reverting to its parent form
when placed under the same conditions with it. Morphological species,
that is, forms which differ to an amount that would justify their being
considered good species, have been produced in plenty through
selection by man out of variations arising under domestication or
cultivation. 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, for I observed in the course of
my travels a number of similar instances. 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. Generally
the supposed parent also seems to have been modified, and then the
demonstration is not so clear, for some of the links in the chain of
variation are wanting. The process of origination of a species in nature
as it takes place successively, must be ever, perhaps, beyond man's
power to trace, on account of the great lapse of time it requires. But we
can obtain a fair view of it by tracing a variable and far-spreading
species over the wide area of its present distribution; and a long
observation of such will lead to the conclusion that new species must in
all cases have arisen out of variable and widely-disseminated forms. It

sometimes happens, as in the present instance, that we find