In 1988, Alex Shoumatoff, writing in "The New Yorker", makes Bates's "Naturalist" his choice if he were allowed only one book for a tropical journey. In his view, it is "the basic text" and a monument of scientific travel writing. Shoumatoff had in fact spent eight months in Bates's "glorious forest" (he quotes) with a copy in his backpack; he thus admires Bates's acceptance of the inevitable discomfort and homesickness from personal knowledge, noting that Bates only complained when all the following had occurred together: he had been robbed, he had gone barefoot having worn out his shoes, he had received no parcels from England, and worst of all he had nothing left to read. But otherwise Bates was "lost in wonder" at the astonishing diversity of the natural history of the Amazons. He was, writes Shoumatoff, one of the four largely self-educated geniuses who pioneered tropical biology, and who all knew each other: Darwin, Wallace, Bates, and the botanist Richard Spruce.