What with all the museums having been closed for so long now (don’t even remind me of the Humboldt exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that never even opened…), I was very pleased to be graced with the arrival recently of a new book from Smithsonian Books that is essentially a museum exhibition of Henry Walter Bates’ journals from his Amazon explorations in the mid Nineteen Century presented in printed and bound form.
Titled A Naturalist in the Amazon; The Journals & Writings of Henry Walter Bates this new book presents full-color, life-sized images form the pages of Bates’ first and second Amazon journals, combined with selections from his The Naturalist on the River Amazon; A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel (still available today from Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Library Collection).
While not containing the full text of Bates’ journals or the book he later wrote from them, this new Smithsonian volume offers a vivid introduction into Bates’ explorations, discoveries, and theories, and – as with similar but in-person natural history exhibitions – it is hoped that it will serve to inspire curiosity in many who read it to learn more about one of the Nineteenth Century’s most significant writers in evolutionary biology.
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