Henry Walter Bates

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the naturalist. For the politician, see Henry Bates (politician).

Henry Walter Bates (February 8, 1825 – February 16, 1892) was an English naturalist and explorer.

Bates is most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection in a shipwreck. When Bates arrived home seven years later (in 1859) he had sent back over 14,000 specimens (mostly insects) of which 8,000 were new to science.

Bates was born in Leicester, and at 13 he became apprentice to a hosier. He studied in his spare time, and collected insects in Charnwood Forest. In 1843 he had a short paper on beetles published in The Zoologist magazine. He became friends with Wallace, who was also a keen entomologist, and after reading William H. Edwards' book on his Amazon expedition they decided to visit the region themselves.

Bates and Wallace sailed from Liverpool in April 1848, arriving in Belém at the end of May. For the first year they settled in a villa near the city, collecting birds and insects. After that they agreed to collect independently, Bates travelling to Cametá on the Tocantins River. He then moved up the Amazon, to Óbidos, Manaus and finally Tefé, which was his headquarters for four and a half years. His health eventually deteriorated and he returned to England, sending his collection by three different ships to avoid the same fate as Wallace. He spent the next three year writing his account of the trip, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.

Henry Bates is famous for his amplification of Darwin's and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection. His own theory of mimicry, which now bears his name (Batesian Mimicry), provided evidence for evolution by natural selection.

From 1864 onwards, he worked as assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society then selling his Lepidoptera to Godman and Salvin and beginning to work mostly on cerambycids, carabids, and cicindelids. In 1881 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He died of bronchitis.

In 1861 he married Sarah Ann Mason.[1] A large part of his collections are in the British Museum. Consult The Field, London, February 20, 1892.

[edit] Works

Biologia Centrali-Americana Insecta. Coleoptera. Volume I , Part 1 (1881-1884)
Insecta. Coleoptera. Pectinicornia and Lamellicornia. Volume II , Part 2 (1886-1890)
Insecta. Coleoptera. Phytophaga (-part). Volume VI , Part 1 (1880-1892) (coauthored by David Sharp).