Footsteps in the Forest: Alfred Russell Wallace in the Amazon

Sandra Knapp

Natural History Museum

2013

160 páginas

5h 20m

ISBN-10: 0565093304

Famous for his investigations in the Malay Archipelago in the 1850s, which led him to form the theory that natural selection drives evolution (as had Charles Darwin privately), Alfred Russell Wallace was only a novice wanting to learn the rare-species collecting trade when he reached the Amazon River in 1848. In the four years that he spent exploring the humid, insect-ridden tributaries of the tropical river, he developed a talent for finding rare species and gained special insight into the order of nature. According to author and botanist Knapp, the story of Wallace’s South American years has been forgotten because his specimens and journals were lost in a shipwreck, delaying his scientific publishing career. He saved only a box with drawings of fish and palm trees. Using those drawings, letters, and quotes from Wallace’s 1905 autobiography, Knapp vividly recounts the adventurous fieldwork that prepared a pioneering naturalist to challenge and rewrite natural history.