Abstract
HENRY WALTER BATES was a native of Leicester, and was engaged in his father's warehouse when, about the year 1845, he made the acquaintance of Alfred Russel Wallace, then English master in the Collegiate School of that town. Bates was at that time an ardent entomologist, while Wallace was chiefly interested in botany; but the latter at once took up beetle-collecting, and after he left Leicester the following year kept up an entomological correspondence 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. Bates spent eleven years in the country, divided pretty equally between the lower and the upper Amazon, and he amassed a wonderful collection of insects. Returning home in 1859, he devoted himself to the study of his collections, and in 1861 read before the Linnean Society his remarkable and epoch-making paper on the Heliconidæ of the Amazon Valley. In this paper, besides making important corrections in the received classification of this group and its allies, he discussed and illustrated in the most careful manner the wonderful facts of “mimicry,” and for the first time gave a clear and intelligible explanation of the phenomena, their origin and use, founded on the accepted principles of variation and natural selection. In spite of countless attacks—usually by persons who are more or less ignorant of the facts to be explained—this theory still holds its ground, and notwithstanding the constant accumulation of new facts, and its discussion by new writers, it has never been more clearly or more fully explained than by its original discoverer.
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W., A. H. W. Bates, the Naturalist of the Amazons. Nature 45, 398–399 (1892). https://doi.org/10.1038/045398c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/045398c0