THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
Vou. XXV.] APRIL, 1892. [No. 847. 
HENRY WALTER BATES, F.R.S. 
(Wira Porrrair.) 
Henry Water Bates, whose name is known over the wide 
world as that of the author of the ‘ Naturalist on the Amazons,’ was 
born in Leicester, 8th February, 1825: he must have developed 
very early a taste for Entomology, for when only seventeen or 
eighteen years of age he published notes on Coleoptera in the 
‘Zoologist. His natural taste was spurred by the spirit of 
emulation that so often moves young collectors. Edwin Brown 
was a neighbour, and somewhat a senior, and Bates was wont in 
after life to relate the determined efforts he made as a young man 
to find some of the rarer or more interesting species that his 
friend had secured. 
Bates came of a mercantile family, and was himself destined 
for a career of this nature; but about the year 1845 he made the 
Acquaintance of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was then an English 
master in a school at Leicester, and who was interested in Botany. 
Bates appears to have enlisted the interest of Wallace in the 
cause of Entomology, and, as we learn from Wallace himself, 
“the latter at once took up beetle-collecting, and after he left 
Leicester, the following year, kept up an entomological corre- 
spondence with his friend. Two years later, Wallace proposed a 
joint expedition to Para, in order to collect insects and other 
natural objects, attracted to this locality by the charming account 
of the country in Mr. W. H. Edwards’s ‘Voyage up the Amazon,’ 
a choice confirmed by the late Edward Doubleday, who had just 
received some new and very beautiful butterflies collected near 
the city of Para. The two explorers sailed from Liverpool in 
April, 1848, in a barque of 192 tons burthen, one of the very few 
vessels then trading to Para, and the results of their journey are 
well known to naturalists. They made joint collections for nearly 
a year while staying at or near Para, but afterwards found it more 
convenient to take separate districts and collect independently.” 
In 1848, as stated by Mr. Wallace, Bates arrived in the 
ENTOM.—APRIL, 1892. I 
