Three naturalists walk into the world’s largest tropical rainforest…
No, it’s not the set-up for what could indeed be a pretty good natural science joke (with a punchline that includes the phrase “Good thing Spruce brought the tonic water!”); rather it’s the beginnings of a series of adventures that would yield some of the most significant scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century.
While many readers will likely be familiar with the essential biographies of Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and Richard Spruce, John Hemming’s new book Naturalists in Paradise; Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon promises to delve much deeper into their journeys than previous biographers in order to open new levels of understanding of just what such travels as theirs meant both for them and their contemporaries as well as for us today.
