n8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF HENRY WALTER BATES. 



HENRY WALTER BATES is "best known to science as the 

 propounder of the doctrine of protective resemblance or 

 mimicry ; and to science and the reading public as the author of 

 the book, A Naturalist on the Amazons, which has been accorded 

 by competent critics a place as a scientific book of travels along- 

 side of Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist, Wallace's Malay Archi- 

 pelago, and the volume of Hooker. 



Mr. Bates was born in Leicester, England, February 8, 1825, 

 and died in London, February 16, 1892. He was the son of a manu- 

 facturer of his native town, known as " Honest Harry Bates," and 

 was intended for a business career. After receiving the usual 

 instruction of tradesmen's sons at a boarding school in Billesdon, 

 he was apprenticed to Alderman Gregory, hosiery manufacturer, 

 Leicester, in whose shop his working hours were from 7 A. M. 

 to 8 P. M. AVith all the laborious character of his duties, it was 

 during the apprenticeship, his brother says, that he laid the 

 foundation of all that he afterward was. He became a mem- 

 ber of the Mechanics' Institute of Leicester, which had a good 

 library and numerous evening classes with competent masters ; 

 entered the Greek, Latin, French, drawing, and composition 

 classes; "and worked with an energy and perseverance that 

 brought him to the front in all." This he did by studying late 

 into the night and in the early hours of the morning. He was a 

 diligent reader, setting special value upon Gibbon's great history, 

 joined a glee club, learned to play the guitar, and became known 

 as a good barytone singer. 



While attending the classes in the Mechanics' Institute he be- 

 came acquainted with a number of gentlemen who had tastes for 

 natural history. He was specially inclined to entomology, and 

 cultivated first the Lepidoptera and afterward the Coleoptera. 

 Holidays came rarely to the boy, but they were eagerly utilized 

 for collecting excursions, beginning the year's work usually with 

 Good Friday. Young Bates habitually wrote descriptive accounts 

 of his expeditions, and was accustomed to sketch and write out 

 descriptions of all the principal insects captured. 



After the death of Alderman Gregory, his master, several 

 years before the expiration of his apprenticeship, Bates managed 

 the business on a small scale for the deceased proprietor's son. 

 He had formed an extensive collection of British beetles and was 

 in correspondence with the chief coleopterists of the time. Prob- 

 ably his first contribution to entomological literature was a Note 

 on Coleopterous Insects frequenting Damp Places, which was 

 published in the first number of The Zoologist, in 1813. A situa- 



