From The London Quarterly Review.
GLEANINGS FROM THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE TROPICS.
ART. VI.—1. A Narrative Of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, etc.By Alfred R. Wallace. London: 1853.
2. Himalayan Journals; or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim, and Nepal Himalayas. By Joseph D. Hooker, M.D., R.N., F.R.S. London: 1854.
3. Three Visits to Madagascar during the Years1853, 1854, 1856, with Notices of the Natural History of the Country, etc. By the Rev. W. Ellis, F.H.S. London: 1859.
4. The Tropical World: A Popular Scientific Account of the Natural History of the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms. By Dr. G. Hartwig. London: 1863.
5. The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, etc., during eleven Years of Travel. By Henry Walter Bates. London: 1863.
The naturalist will never have to complain, with Alexander, that he has no more worlds to conquer, so inexhaustible is the wide field of nature, and so numerous are the vast areas which as yet have never at all, or only partially, been explored by travellers. What may not be in store for some future adventurer in little known regions; what new and wonderful forms of animals and plants may not reward the zealous traveller, when no less than eight thousand species of animals new to science have been discovered by Mr. Bates during his eleven years' residence on the Amazons? Nor is it alone new forms of animated nature that await the enterprise of the naturalist; a whole mine of valuable material, the working of which is attended with the greatest pleasure, lies before him in the discovery of new facts with regard to the habits, structure, and local distribution of animals and plants. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance to the philosophic naturalist of such studies in these days of thought and progress. The collector of natural curiosities may be content with the possession of a miscellaneous lot of objects, but the man of science pursues his investigations with a view of discovering, if possible, some of those wonderful laws which govern the organic world, some of the footprints of the Creator in the production of the countless forms of animal and vegetable life with which this beautiful world abounds.
We purpose in this article to bring before the reader's notice a few gleanings from the natural history of the tropics, merely surmising that we shall linger with more than ordinary pleasure over the productions of tropical [{179}] South America, of which Mr. Bates has charmingly and most instructively written in his recently published work, whose title is given at the head of this article; we shall pause to admire, with Dr. Hooker, some of the productions of the mighty Himalayan mountains; and we may also visit Madagascar in company with so trustworthy a traveller as Mr. Ellis.
The ancients, before the time of Alexander's Indian expedition, were unacquainted with any tropical forms of plants, and great was their astonishment when they first beheld them:
"Gigantic forms of plants and animals," as Humboldt says, "filled the imagination with exciting imagery. Writers from whose severe and scientific style any degree of inspiration is elsewhere entirely absent, become poetical when describing the habits of the elephant,—the height of the trees, 'to the summit of which an arrow cannot reach, and whose leaves are broader then the shields of infantry,'—the bamboo, a light, feathery, arborescent grass, of which single joints (internodia) served as four-oared boats,—and the Indian fig-tree, whose pendant branches take root around the parent stem, which attains a diameter of twenty-eight feet, 'forming,' as Onesicritus expresses himself with great truth to nature, 'a leafy canopy similar to a many-pillared tent.'" [Footnote 24]