126 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



cates in London to pay expenses, and gather facts, 

 as Mr. Wallace expressed it in one of his letters, 

 * towards solving the problem of the origin of 

 species/ 



The choice was a happy one, for, except by the 

 German zoologist Von Spix, and the botanist Von 

 Martius in 1817-20, and subsequently by Count de 

 Castelnau, no exploration of a region so rich and 

 interesting to the biologist had been attempted. 

 Early in 1848 Bates and Wallace met in London 

 to study South American animals and plants in the 

 principal collections, and afterwards went to Chats- 

 worth to gain information about orchids, which they 

 proposed to collect in the moist tropical forests and 

 send home. 



On 26th April 1848, they embarked at Liverpool 

 in a barque of only 192 tons burthen, 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 May. 



The travellers soon settled in a rocinha, or country- 

 house, a mile and a 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 vegetation, 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 

 remunerative and wholly pleasurable, till, on reach- 

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

 thousand miles from Para, in March 1850, Bates 



