About Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates 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 of which 8,000 were 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. 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. 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. 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.
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