Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

74 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP.
August. I shall thus be able to gather a few
things which illness and fatigue obliged
leave at the time of my
me to
arrival. I have been on
the top of three mountains, and their vegetation
is so nearly identical, that I should hardly find
work at Tarapoto for a second year. . . .
[The next letter from Tarapoto to Mr. Bentham,
dated April 7, 1856, is chiefly personal and botanical
gossip relating to his work and future travels.
After describing how a box from England was
damaged and nearly lost by the boat being wrecked
in the rapids of the Huallaga, he adds :
" The diffi-
culty, risk, and expense of getting plants from here
all the way down to the mouth of the Amazon are
so great, that I see my Tarapoto collections are
not likely to repay more than the expense of
collecting."
The letter concludes with a reference to the
news he had just received of the ravages of yellow
fever at the Barra, and then gives a short biographical
note about a bird- collector, whose name
and specimens must be well known to most English
ornithologists. I therefore give it.]
" I am sorry to say that Hauxwell is about percliclo
(lost) as far as natural history is concerned,
which is a pity, as no one has come here who puts
up birds so beautifully as he does. He has got an
Indian squaw and a child, and is turned
'
merchant.'
I am surprised he writes English (with a small
taste of 'Yorkshire') so well as he does. His
parents removed from Hull (where he was to Oporto when he was a little ; boy
born)
thence he
came out to the coast of Brazil as merchant's clerk,
and anon turned naturalist."