The Naturalist on the River Amazons

Henry Walter Bates left Leicester for Brazil in 1848 with Alfred Russel Wallace and stayed eleven years, most of them alone on the Amazon, shipping home more than fourteen thousand species of which roughly half were new to science. His 1863 account of those years moves between insects and people with the same steady curiosity: the discipline of army ants, a village festival, a sloth crossing a road, and the harmless butterflies that copy the wing patterns of poisonous ones, a trick now called Batesian mimicry after him. Darwin admired the book, and it earns that, because the observation is patient and the writing is warm instead of showy. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.