MODERN EVOLUTION. 



137 



principal collections, and afterward went to Chats- 

 worth to gain information about orchids, which they 

 proposed to collect in the moist tropical forests and 

 send home. 



On 26th of April, 1848, they embarked at Liver- 

 pool in a barque of only 192 tons burden, one of the 

 few ships then trading to Para, to which seaport of 

 the Amazons region a swift passage, " straight as 

 an arrow," brought them on 28th of May. 



The travellers soon settled in a rocinha, or 

 country-house, a mile and half from Para, and close 

 to the forest, which came down to their doors. Like 

 other towns along the Amazons, Para stands on 

 ground cleared from the forest that stretches, a well- 

 nigh pathless jungle of luxuriant primeval vegeta- 

 tion, two thousand miles inland. In that paradise of 

 the naturalist, the collectors gathered consignments 

 which met with ready sale in London, and thus 

 spent a couple of years in pursuits moderately re- 

 munerative and wholly pleasurable, till, on reach- 

 ing Barra, at the mouth of the Rio Negro, one thou- 

 sand miles from Para, in March, 1850, Bates and 

 Wallace, who was accompanied by his younger 

 brother, parted company, " finding it more conven- 

 ient to explore separate districts and collect inde- 

 pendently." Wallace took the northern parts and 

 tributaries of the Amazons, and Bates kept to the 

 main stream, which, from the direction it seems to 

 take at the fork of the Rio Negro, is called the Upper 

 Amazons or the Solimoens. Different in character 

 10 



