164 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XXI. No. 529 



written when time had not dimmed nor distance distorted the 

 vividness of the images be depicts. But the volume also contains 

 a sketch of the life of Mr. Bates, with extracts from his journals 

 and letters, together with an abridgment of the celebrated article 

 on mimicry in butterflies, which placed its author at once in the 

 front ranli of philosophical naturalists. The book, therefore, be- 

 comes practically a new one, which every lover of such literature 

 should not fail to possess. 



The life of Mr. Bates, aside from his travels on the Amazons, 

 was an uneventful one. He was born in Leicester, on Feb. 8, 

 1825, and was apprenticed at the age of 13 to a hosiery manu- 

 facturer. He inherited from his mother a tendency toward 

 dyspepsia, and so was always fd,r from strong, but he early mani- 

 fested a love for natural history, and spent all his spare time 

 hunting butterflies and beetles. He began to write out his notes 

 at an early age, and before he was 20 years old be had published 

 some of his observations. It was while at Leicester that he made 

 the acquaintance of Wallace, and the two friends went, in 1848, 

 to the Amazons. His companion remained four years, but Bates 

 himself stayed for se^en years longer, and returned to England 

 in 1859, with about 15,(j00 species, 8,000 of which were new to 

 science, and with a wealth of observations that occupied his pen 

 for many years. 



Bates was the first to point out the curious fact of mimetic 

 analogies between various species of butterflies, and to suggest 

 that the cause of the mimicry was natural selection. He also 

 suggested that the reason for the mimicry lay in the unpalatable- 

 ness of the mimicked species, so that the mimickers, although them- 

 selves edible, escaped their enemies by taking on the form and 

 coloration of the species that birds would not eat. An abstract of 

 this paper, with a colored plate, is given in Dr. Clodd's memoir. 



Among the more interesting portions of this part of the vol- 

 ume are a few extracts from Bates's journal. It is to be regretted 

 that there are not more. In the following he records some of 

 his impressions of Lyell. 



"Sir Charles Lyell has the appearance of a fidgety man not 

 well at ease with himself. He is very greedy of fame, and proud 

 of his aristocratic fi'iends and a'cquaintances. He does not seem 

 to be a very ready man ; his learning does not appear to be at his 

 fingers' ends; so that when a subject is suddenly presented to 

 him he has difiiculty in collecting his scattered thoughts and 

 bringing forth what he knows upon it. But then he is getting 

 an old man now. Mr. Davidson told me he was a very hesitating 

 writer, and re-wrote every sentence three or four times on the 

 average. . . . But, like a well-bred gentleman, Sir Charles can 

 become very sociable, and evidently likes a good dinner with 

 brilliant conversation : Darwin says he likes to hear himself talk. 

 At the Geological Club ... he made me laugh by retailing a 

 very good thing. The conversation ran on the comparative merits 

 of the scientific hypothesis of the origin of man and the biblical 

 man. ' Why,' says he, 'the question resolves itself into few words: 

 Is man modified mud, or modified monkey?' " 



It was due to the urgency of Darwin that Bates began and con- 

 tinued to write his travels; and on the appearance of the book in 

 1863 it met with cordial praise from all quarters. His style is 

 direct and concise. While many writers would have given a 

 long account of the outward voyage from England, Bates dis- 

 poses of it in three lines, and plunges almost at once into the 

 luxuriant forests that were to be his home for eleven long years. 

 His first walk in the forest was taken with Wallace on the day of 

 their arrival at Para, and a part of it is thus described : — 



"As we continued our walk the brief twilight commenced, and 

 the sounds of multifarious life came from the vegetation around. 

 The whirring of cicadas, the shrill stridulation of a vast number 

 and variety of field-crickets and grasshoppers, each species sound- 

 ing its peculiar note; the plaintive hootings of tree-frogs, — all 

 blended together in one continuous ringing sound, — the audible 

 expression of the teeming profusion of nature. As night came 

 on, many species of frogs and toads in the marshy places joined 

 in the chorus; their croaking and drumming, far- louder than 

 anything I had before heard in the same line, being added to the 

 other noises, created an almost deafening din. This uproar of 

 lite, I afterwards found, never wholly ceased, night or day ; in 



course of time I became, like other residents, accustomed to it. 

 It is, however, one of the peculiarities of a tropical — at least a 

 Brazilian — climate which is most likely to surprise a stranger. 

 After my return to England, the death-like stillness of days in the 

 country appeared to me as strange as the ringing uproar did on 

 my first arrival at Para." 



The fact of a struggle for existence among animals is generally 

 recognized by all, but the same struggle among plants is not sO' 

 easily observed. In the luxuriant forests of the tropics the fact 

 is forced upon all observers, and Bates gives a striking example- 

 of it. A parasitic tree occurs very commonly near Para, whicb 

 has received the appropriate name of the Murderer Liana CM' Sipo. 

 It is described and the fact commented upon as follows: "It 

 springs up close to the tree on which it intends to fix itself and 

 the wood of its stem grows by spreading itself like a plastic mould 

 over one side of the trunk of its supporter. It then puts forth 

 from each side an arm-like branch, which grows rapidly, and 

 looks as though a stream of sap were flowing and hardening as it 

 went. This adheres closely to the trunk of the victim, and the 

 two arms meet on the opposite side and blend together. These 

 arms are put forth at somevvhat regular intervals in mountings 

 upwards, and the victim, when its strangler is full-grown," be- 

 comes tightly clasped by a number of inflexible rings. These 

 rings gradually grow larger as the murderer flourishes, rearing 

 its crown of foliage to the sky, mingled with that of its neighbor, 

 and in course of time they kill it by stopping the flow of its sap. 

 The strange spectacle then remains of the selfish parasite clasping 

 in its arms the lifeless and decaying body of its victim, which had 

 been a h-elp to its own growth. Its ends have been served — it 

 has flowered and fruited, reproduced and disseminated its kind; 

 and now, when the dead trunk moulders away, its own end ap- 

 proaches; its support is gone, and itself also falls. 



"The Murderer Sipo merely exhibits, in a more conspicuous 

 manner than usual, the struggle which necessarily exists amongst 

 vegetable forms in these crowded forests, where individual is 

 competing with individual and species with species, all striving 

 to reach light and air in order to unfold their leaves and perfect 

 their orgaris of fructification. All species entail in their success- 

 ful struggles the injury or destruction of many of their neighbors 

 or supporters, but the process is not in others so speaking to the 

 eye as it is in the case of the Matador. The efforts to spread theii- 

 roots are as strenuous in some plants and trees as the struggle to 

 mount upwards in others. From these apparent strivings result 

 the buttressed stems, the dangling air-roots, and other similar 

 phenomena. The competition amongst organized beings has beeo 

 prominently brought forth in Darwin's ' Origin of Species ;" it is 

 a fact which must be always kept in view in studying these sub- 

 jects. It exists everywhere, in every zone, in both the animal 

 and vegetable kingdoms. It is doubtless most severe, on the 

 whole, in tropical countries, but its display in vegetable forms in 

 the forest is no exceptional phenomenon. It is only more con- 

 spicuously exhibited, owing perhaps to its affecting principally 

 the vegetative organs, — root, stem, and leaf, — whose growth is 

 also stimulated by the intense light, the warmth, and the hu- 

 midity. The competition exists also in temperate countries, but 

 it is there concealed under the external appearance of repose 

 which vegetation wears. It affects, in this case, perhaps more 

 the reproductive than the vegetative organs, especially the flow- 

 ers, which it is probaiile are far more general decorations in the 

 woodlands of high latitudes than in tropical forests." 



It is as much in the reflections that the varied phenomena under 

 observation give rise to as in the descriptive portions that the 

 value and charm of the book lie. There is always something 

 new. Now it is the colossal trees, then the wonderful profusion! 

 of insect life, or the graphic pictures of free life in the forest. 

 Nothing is more striking than the difference between the fauna 

 on the two banks of the great Amazons, and Bates refers to this 

 in numerous places. So, too, the wonderful fact that certain in- 

 sects, especially the butterflies, mimic others is of vast interest. 

 Then the great variation presented by some forms of insects, sO' 

 that at the two ends of a series we have what are commonly 

 called distinct species, while there are intermediate forms pre- 

 senting every gradation between them. Those naturalists who 



