Bates, HENRY WALTER, F.R.S., naturalist and traveller, was born at Leicester, 8th February 1825. During his apprenticeship to a manufacturing hosier, he formed a friendship, due to kindred love of natural history, with Mr Alfred R. Wallace, then master in the Collegiate School. In April 1848 the two left to explore the Amazons, where Bates remained till June 1859. In 1861 he published his distinctive contribution to the theory of natural selection in a paper explaining the phenomena of Mimicry (q.v.). The narrative of his travels, The Naturalist on the Amazons, which at once took high rank, appeared in 1863. In 1864 he was appointed assistant-secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, which post he filled till his death, 16th February 1892. Bates was pre-eminently a philosophical naturalist, his special study, that of beetles, being mainly for the light which that vast order throws on the theory of descent.
See the Obituary in Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., April 1862; The Naturalist on the Amazons (reprint of 1st edition, with memoir by Edward Clodd, 1892).