After that they agreed to collect independently, Bates travelling to Cametá on the Tocantins River. ![]() For the first year they settled in a villa near the city, collecting birds and insects. All known letters exchanged between Wallace and Bates are available in Wallace Letters Online.īates in Amazonia: "Adventure with curl-crested toucans"īates and Wallace sailed from Liverpool in April 1848, arriving in Pará (now Belém) at the end of May. Also they collected "wants lists" of the desires of museums and collectors. They did this by viewing South American plants and animals in the main collections. ) The two friends, who were both by now experienced amateur entomologists, met in London to prepare themselves. (The often repeated statement that the main purpose was for the travellers to "gather facts towards solving the problem of the origin of species", and that Wallace put this in a letter to Bates, is almost certainly a myth, originating in a convenient adjustment of history by Bates in The Naturalist on the River Amazons of 1863. There an agent would sell them for a commission. In 1847 Wallace and Bates discussed the idea of an expedition to the Amazon rainforest, the plan being to cover expenses by sending specimens back to London. Edwards's Voyage Up the River Amazons on his Amazon expedition, and this started them thinking that a visit to the region would be exciting, and might launch their careers. These included Thomas Robert Malthus on population, James Hutton and Charles Lyell on geology, Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and above all, the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (by Robert Chambers), which put evolution into everyday discussion amongst literate folk. Wallace also became a keen entomologist, (his first interest had been plants) and he read the same kind of books as Wallace, and as Darwin, Huxley and no doubt many others had. He became friends with Wallace when the latter took a teaching post in the Leicester Collegiate School. In 1843 he had a short paper on beetles published in the journal Zoologist. He joined the Mechanics' Institute (which had a library), studied in his spare time and collected insects in Charnwood Forest. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he had a normal education to the age of about 13 when he became apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer. Bates wrote up his findings in his best-known work, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.īates was born in Leicester to a literate middle-class family. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,712 species (mostly of insects) of which 8,000 were (according to Bates, but see Van Wyhe ) new to science. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection on the return voyage when his ship caught fire. He was most famous for his expedition to the rainforests of the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace, starting in 1848. Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS FGS (8 February 1825, in Leicester – 16 February 1892, in London) was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. For example, the giant tortoises on one island had saddle-shaped shells, whereas those on another island had dome-shaped shells, as you can see in the photos below.President of the Entomological Society of London, fellow of the Linnaean Society, and of the Royal Society Darwin noticed that the plants and animals on the different islands also differed. Some are rocky and dry others have better soil and more rainfall. Individual Galápagos islands differ from one another in important ways. The Galápagos Islands are a group of 16 small volcanic islands that are 966 kilometers (600 miles) off the west coast of South America. From left: Giant Marine Iguana, Blue-Footed Boobies, and Fossil Skeleton of a Giant Ground Sloth in a museum.ĭarwin’s most important observations were made on the Galápagos Islands (shown on the map above of the Beagle voyage). ![]() ![]() He also dug up the fossil skeleton of a giant ground sloth-like the one shown here. \): On his voyage, Darwin saw giant marine iguanas and blue-footed boobies.
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