Henry Walter Bates - Life

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.