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The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates
page 6 of 565 (01%)
only to a few score acres." During the whole of this time Mr.
Bates' headquarters were at Ega, on the Teffe, a confluent of the
great river from the south, whence excursions were made sometimes
for 300 or 400 miles into the interior. In the intervals Mr.
Bates followed his pursuit as a collecting naturalist in the same
"peaceful, regular way," as he might have done in a European
village. Our author draws a most striking picture of the quiet,
secluded life he led in this far-distant spot. The difficulty of
getting news and the want of intellectual society were the great
drawbacks--"the latter increasing until it became almost
insupportable." "I was obliged at last," Mr. Bates naively
remarks, "to come to the conclusion that the contemplation of
Nature, alone is not sufficient to fill the human heart and
mind." Mr. Bates must indeed have been driven to great straits as
regards his mental food, when, as he tell us, he took to reading
the Athenaeum three times over, "the first time devouring the
more interesting articles--the second, the whole of the
remainder--and the third, reading all the advertisements from
beginning to end."

Ega was, indeed, as Mr. Bates remarks, a fine field for a Natural
History collector, the only previous scientific visitants to that
region having been the German Naturalists, Spix and Martius, and
the Count de Castelnau when he descended the Amazons from the
Pacific. Mr. Bates' account of the monkeys of the genera
Brachyuyus, Nyctipithecus and Midas met with in this region, and
the whole of the very pregnant remarks which follow on the
American forms of the Quadrumana, will be read with interest by
every one, particularly by those who pay attention to the
important subject of geographical distribution. We need hardly
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