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

This 1853 publication documents Alfred R. Wallace's impressively detailed observations of the then largely unknown Amazon region.

Alfred Russel Wallace (Author)

9781108007290, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 February 2010

576 pages, 1 colour illus.
21.6 x 14 x 3.3 cm, 0.72 kg

A friend of Charles Darwin and a social activist respected by John Stuart Mill, Alfred R. Wallace (1823–1913) was an outstanding nineteenth-century intellectual. Wallace, renowned in his time as the co-discoverer of natural selection, was a young schoolteacher when he began his exciting career as an explorer-naturalist, and set off for Brazil in 1848 with Henry Walter Bates. A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1853) is the stimulating and engaging result of this first expedition and a precursor to his best-selling Malay Archipelago (1869). The depth and breadth of Wallace's observations in this book as naturalist, anthropologist and geologist are remarkable, and it is tantalising to learn that half his notes and 'the greater part of [his] collections and sketches' were lost at sea when his ship was burned on his voyage home.

Preface
1. Para
2. Para
3. The Tocantins
4. Mexiana and Marajo
5. The Guama and Capim rivers
6. Santarem and Monteallegre
7. Barra do Rio Negro and the Solimoes
8. The upper Rio Negro
9. Javita
10. First ascent of the River Uaupes
11. On the Rio Negro
12. The cataracts of the Uaupes
13. Sao Jeronymo to the downs
14. The physical geography and geology of the Amazon valley
15. Vegetation of the Amazon valley
16. Observations on the zoology of the Amazon district
17. On the aborigines of the Amazon
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]