Henry Walter Bates

Henry Walter Bates (8 February 1825 – 16 February 1892) was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the rainforests of the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace, starting in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection on the return voyage when his ship caught fire. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,712 species (mostly of insects) of which 8,000 were (according to Bates, but see Van Wyhe) new to science. Bates wrote up his findings in his best-known work, The Naturalist on the River Amazons (1863). Batesian mimicry is named in his honor.

Life

Bates was born in Leicester to a literate middle-class family. However, like Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he had a normal education to the age of about 13 when he became apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer. He joined the Mechanics' Institute (which had a library), studied in his spare time and collected insects in Charnwood Forest. In 1843 he had a short paper on beetles published in the journal Zoologist.

He became friends with Wallace when the latter took a teaching post in the Leicester Collegiate School. Wallace also became a keen entomologist, (his first interest had been plants) and he read the same kind of books as Wallace, and as Darwin, Huxley and no doubt many others had. These included Thomas Robert Malthus on population, James Hutton and Charles Lyell on geology, Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and above all, the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (by Robert Chambers), which put evolution into everyday discussion amongst literate folk. They also read William H. Edwards's Voyage Up the River Amazons on his Amazon expedition, and this started them thinking that a visit to the region would be exciting, and might launch their careers.