A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro
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THE MINERVA LIBRARY OF FAMOUS BOOKS. Edited by G. T. BETTANY, M.A., B.Sc. A NARRATIVE OF TRAVELS ON THE AMAZON AND RIO NEGRO, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THE NATIVE TRIBES, AND OBSERVATIONS ON THE CLIMATE, GEOLOGY, AND NATURAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON VALLEY. BY ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, LL.D., Author of "The Malay Archipelago," "Darwinism," etc., etc. With a Portrait of the Author, a Map, and full-page Illustrations. WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR. THIRD EDITION. WARD, LOCK AND CO., LONDON, NEW YORK, AND MELBOURNE 1890. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION. (BY THE EDITOR,) Alfred Russel Wallace,the co-discoverer with Mr. Darwin of the principle of natural selec tion as the main agent in the evolution of species, has in his published works travelled over a much more diversified range of subjects than Mr. Darwin. To books of travel, of philosophical and of systematic natural history, he has added others dealing with the causes of depression of trade, proposing land nationalisation, defending belief in miracles and in modern spiritualism, and attacking vaccination. Although it would not be right here to enter into a criticism of such con troversial works, enough may be said to indicate that their author, admittedly a master-mind in regard to the philosophy and the details of evolution, is widely qualified in regard to political and social questions. Born at Usk in Monmouthshire on the 8th of January, 1823, and educated at Hertford Grammar School, the future adven turous traveller early became a voyager on a small scale, during his residence with an elder brother, a land surveyor and archi tect. F'rom 1836 to 1848 while so occupied he resided in various parts of England and Wales, and acquired some knowledge of agriculture and of the social and economic conditions of the labouring classes. While living in South Wales, about 1840, he first turned his attention to natural history, devoting all his spare time to collecting and preserving the native plants, and eagerly reading books of travel. While residing at Leicester in 1844-5 (as an English master in the Collegiate School), he made the acquaintance of Mr. H. W. Bates, an ardent entomologist, and when, some years later, the desire to visit tropical countries became too strong to be IV INTRODUCTION. resisted, he proposed to Mr. Bates a joint expedition to the Amazons, one of the objects, in addition to the collection of natural history specimens, being to gather facts, as Mr. Wallace expressed it in one of his letters to Mr. Bates, " towards solving the problem of the origin of species,'' a subject on which they had already conversed and corresponded extensively. The two friends met in London early in 1848 to study the collec tions of South American animals and plants already there; and they embarked at Liverpool in a small trading vessel on the 20th of April, 1848, reaching the mouth of the Amazons just a month later. From this date the present volume speaks for itself. We will merely note that Mr. Bates took a different route of exploration from Mr. Wallace from March 1850; he remained seven years longer in the country, and in 1863 pub- lished his most attractive" Naturalist on the Amazons." Mr. Wallace's travels on the Rio Negro and to the upper waters of the Orinoco, his adventurous ascent of the rapid river Uaupes, his observations on the natural history and the native tribes of the Amazon valley, are simply and naturally recorded in this volume. His assemblage of facts will be seen to form a broad basis for induction as to causes and modes of trans formation of species. His return voyage bade fair to be his last, for the vessel in which he sailed took fire, and was com pletely destroyed, with a large proportion of Mr. Wallace's live animals and valuable specimens. Ten anxious days had to be spent in boats, tortured not only by shortness of food but by remembrances of the dangers encountered in obtaining valued specimens, now irretrievably lost. It was only after an eighty days' voyage that Mr. Wallace landed at Deal on the 18th of October, 1852. His" Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro," published in the autumn of 1853, had an excellent reception, and after disposing of the collections which had been sent home previous to his return Mr. Wallace started for another tropical region, the Malay archipelago. From July 1854, when he arrived in Singapore, to the early part of 1862, Mr. Wallace travelled many thousand miles, mostly in regions little explored before, especially for natural history purposes. Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Timor, Celebes, the Moluccas, the Aru and Ké Islands, and even New Guinea were visited, some more than once, and long sojourns were made in the most interesting regions. Even those who have read his INTRODUCTION. V delightful "Malay Archipelago,'' first published in 1869, cannot know all the treasures given to science by Mr. Wallace's eight years' expatriation, for before writing his travels he had con tributed no fewer than eighteen papers to the transactions or journals of the Linnean, Zoological, and Entomological Societies, and twelve articles to various scientific periodicals, while in his subsequent volumes on "Natural Selection," 1871, his monumen tal work on the "Geographical Distribution of Animals," 1876, on "Tropical Nature," 1878, and on "Island Life," 1880, he laid open still more fully his accumulations of travel and thought in both hemispheres. One of the most valuable results of his travels in Malaysia was the establishment of a line dividing the archi pelago into two main groups, Indo-Malaysia and Austro Malaysia, marked by peculiar species and groups of animals. This line, now everywhere known as Wallace's line, is marked by a deep sea belt between Celebes and Borneo, and Lombok and Bali respectively ; and it is curious that a similar line, but somewhat further east, divides on the whole the Malay from the Papuan races of man. The new facts on butterflies, on birds of paradise, on mimicry between various animals and plants, and on the Malay and Papuan races are only a few of the subjects of intense interest illuminated by Mr. Wallace as the result of his travels in Malaysia. In a paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for September, 1855, "On the Law that has regulated the Intro duction of New Species," Mr. Wallace had already drawn the conclusion that every species has come into existence coinci dent both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. In the same paper is a brief expression of the idea which Mr. Darwin expanded into one of his fine passages comparing all members of the same class of beings to a great tree. The varied facts of the distribution of animal and plant life, set forth and explained in this paper, foreshadow the author's future great work on the subject. Mr. Darwin, already an observer and student of long standing on the question of the origin of species, had noted this paper and agreed to the truth of almost every word of it. In October 1856, Mr. Wallace wrote to Mr. Darwin from Celebes, and in replying to his letter Mr. Darwin, on May 1st, 1857, said he could plainly see that they had thought much alike, and had to a certain extent come to similar conclusions; and later vi INTRODUCTION. in the same year he wrote to Mr. Wallace, "I infinitely admire and honour your zeal and courage in the good cause of Natural Science." In February 1858 Mr. Wallace wrote an essay at Ternate, " On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original Type," which proved to be the proximate cause of the publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species." The manuscript of this paper was sent to Mr. Darwin, and reached him on June 18th, 18581 and the views it expressed coincided remarkably with those developed in Mr. Darwin's mind by many different lines of investigation. He proposed to get Mr. Wallace's consent to publish it as soon as possible; but on the urgent persuasion of Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, a joint communication of some extracts from a manuscript written by Mr. Darwin in 1839-18441 and a letter written by him to Professor Asa Gray of Boston, U.S., in 1857, together with Mr. Wallace's paper, was made to the Linnean Society on July 1st, 1858. As Sir Joseph Hooker wrote, "The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring ; " and there was no attempt at discussion. The further history of the "Origin of Species " controversy is well known, and has previously been sketched in the first volume of this library. What deserves repeating and emphasizing is that Mr. Wallace must rank as a completely independent and original discoverer of the essential feature of the" Origin ofSpecies." Mr. Wallace originally termed his view one of progression and continued divergence. "This progression," he wrote in the Linnean essay, "by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit." Nothing in scientific history is more interesting or more admirable than the way in which the two great discoverers in biological evolution fully admired and recognized each other's independent work ; and continued their intercourse through life untinged by any shadow of un worthy feeling.