Henry Walter Bates—his life and contributions to biology

Henry Walter Bates was born in Leicester, England, on 8 February 1825. Early in life he developed a keen interest in natural history in general, and in insects in particular. He met and befriended Alfred Russel Wallace, and in 1848 the two embarked on a collecting expedition to the Amazon Valley. They soon parted company and thereafter collected separately in different areas of Amazonia. Bates returned to England 11 years later, in 1859. He was quick to embrace Darwin's and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection, and was one of the first to back the theory with evidence from the natural world. A case in point was Bates's theory of mimicry, which now bears his name. In 1863, his popular book The Naturalist on the River Amazons was published. Bates took the post of Assistant Secretary at the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1864 and continued in that position until his death in 1892. During that period he produced in his spare time a prodigious number of publications in systematic entomology, mostly on Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. Many of his works were accompanied by insightful discussions of zoogeography, thus distinguishing Bates as one of the more remarkable and progressive systematists of his time.