Life
Bates was born in Leicester and, like Wallace, T.H. Huxley and some other British scientists of the time, he had no formal education in science, and left school at 12. He came from a literate middle-class family and taught himself mainly by reading (like Wallace, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he was an auto-didact). At 13 he became apprenticed to a hosier. 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.
Bates became friends with Wallace when the latter took a teaching post in the Leicester Collegiate School. Wallace was also a keen entomologist, and he had read the same kind of books as Bates had, and as Darwin, Huxley and no doubt many others had. Malthus on population, James Hutton and Lyell on geology, Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, and above all, the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which put evolution into everyday discussion amongst literate folk. They also read William H. Edwards on his Amazon expedition, and this started them thinking that a visit to the region would be exciting, and might launch their careers.
Read more about this topic: Henry Walter Bates
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“You’ll have to learn that public life takes a lot of sweat; but it doesn’t need to worry you. You won’t always be right, but you mustn’t suffer from being wrong. That’s what kills people like us.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“My dream of politics all my life has been that it is the common business, that it is something we owe to each other to understand and ... discuss with absolute frankness.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)