The Web of Nature

It is rare that one picks up a book like Manston Bates’ The Forest and the Sea (Random House, $3.95) that can be recommended both for its style and for its scientific accuracy and comprehension. It helps, of course, that Professor Bates can write from first-hand experience about a number of things. He has lived for years in the tropical rain-forests of South America and spent time skin-diving on a coral atoll. He has studied mosquitoes; and often just one kind of mosquito. Dr. Bates has drawn on his broad experience to write about the ecological aspects of life on this earth.

Marston Bates is a tropical man. The tropical seas and the tropical forests are described lovingly. They glow with bright-colored animals and multitudes of interesting plants, and provide a flood of examples of ways of life with complex interrelationships. The author’s enthusiasm for such things and his anecdotal style carry the reader along. Lessons in ecology go down painlessly, even pleasantly.

GC

About the Author

George H. Carter

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It is rare that one picks up a book like Manston Bates’ The Forest and the Sea (Random House, $3.95) that can be recommended both for its style and for its scientific accuracy and comprehension. It helps, of course, that Professor Bates can write from first-hand experience about a number of things. He has lived for years in the tropical rain-forests of South America and spent time skin-diving on a coral atoll. He has studied mosquitoes; and often just one kind of mosquito. Dr. Bates has drawn on his broad experience to write about the ecological aspects of life on this earth.

Marston Bates is a tropical man. The tropical seas and the tropical forests are described lovingly. They glow with bright-colored animals and multitudes of interesting plants, and provide a flood of examples of ways of life with complex interrelationships. The author’s enthusiasm for such things and his anecdotal style carry the reader along. Lessons in ecology go down painlessly, even pleasantly.