Henry Walter Bates
Henry Walter Bates FRS FLS, FGS was an English naturalist and explorer who gave the first scientific account of mimicry in animals. He was most famous for his expedition to the rainforests of the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace, starting in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection on the return voyage when his ship caught fire. When Bates arrived home in 1859 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,712 species of which 8,000 were new to science. Bates wrote up his findings in his bestknown work, The Naturalist on the River Amazons.
Bates was born in Leicester to a literate middleclass family. However, like Wallace, T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he had a normal education to the age of aboutwhen he became apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer. He joined the Mechanics Institute , 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.
Source: Wikipedia