INDEX. 391

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

MEMOIR.

HENRY WALTER BATES was born at Leicester on

February 8th, 1825. His family had been long connected with the manufacture of hosiery, the staple trade of that town. His grandfather, Robert Bates, a dyer of hosiery, was a man of great force of character, which, however, took eccentric forms. Of his children none rose above mediocrity, except Henry, the father of the subject of this memoir. He was born in 1794, and was apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer, in which line of business he started on his own account, achieving fair success. He was above the average of his class in the possession and cultivation of intellectual tastes, which, with other influences, led him to an advanced stage of Unitarianism as contrasted with the more rigid or Arian form of that doctrine prevalent at the time, and still, in some degree, extant in rural districts where the old “ Presbyterian causes ” survive. His diffidence and modesty caused him to shrink from public positions, for which his unswerving integrity fitted him-integrity which, as his distinguished son loved to tell, won for him the sobrzquet of “Honest Harry Bates” among his fellow-townsmen. He died in 1870. His wife, who was the daughter of a wool-stapler—a man of considerable mental attainments, and a friend of Robert Hall, the celebrated Nonconformist divine—was a woman of sweet, loving and unselfish nature, but of feeble constitution. She died at the age of fifty-seven, in 1860.

Of such parentage,—the father an able, upright, modest man, robust in constitution; the mother of gracious nature, but always in delicate health,—were Henry Walter Bates and his three younger brothers, John, Frederick and Samuel, born.

After attending various more or less elementary schools in Leicester, he was placed at a _boarding-school kept by Mr. Creaton, at Billesden, a village some nine miles from Leicester, where he remained till midsummer 1838. An old schoolmate b

remembers him as a studious boy, preferring a ramble in the fields with his collecting-box to cricket and other athletic games. On leaving school he was apprenticed to Mr. Alderman Gregory, a hosiery manufacturer in Leicester. He had to work thirteen hours a day, starting at seven in the morning with sweeping out the warehouse. “ Many a time in his earlier apprenticeship days,” says his brother Frederick, to whom we are indebted for these glimpses of his boyhood, “have I accompanied him to open the warehouse and helped him to ‘sweep up’; my reward being the string and waste that were on the floors of the warehouse, which were always the perquisite of the apprentice.”

That school life had not, as is the growing modern tendency, dulled his desire for knowledge, is evidenced by the employment of his scanty leisure. He joined the classes at the Mechanics Institute, taking up Greek, Latin, French,* drawing and composition, speedily winning prizes in the first two subjects and commendatory places in the others. Amongst his papers are preserved a couple of essays written for the “General Literary Class at the Leicester Mechanics’ Institute” in 1840. One is on the “ Manners, Customs, and Religion of the Ancient Britons, from the invasion of Julius Cesar to the final subduction (sic) of the island by J. Agricola”; and the other is an “ Essay on Forms of Government.” Both show wide reading; the historical paper containing references not only to classical authorities, but to books of travel for purposes of comparison between the Celtic peoples and modern barbaric races. They are remarkably able productions for a boy of fifteen. Though far from strong, inheriting, as did all his brothers, the mother’s dyspeptic weakness, he stole hours from sleep to give to study, often working till midnight and rising at four, sometimes earlier, in the morning, and waking his brother to “hear” his lessons. “ His enthusiasm for his work was unbounded; as witness he had written on the fly-leaf of his Latin grammar:—

“I am as fond of Latin
As women are of satin.”

While devoting so much time to class-work, he imbibed in the atmosphere of home and of the Institute library that love of reading which, to quote his favourite Gibbon, he “ would not exchange for the treasures of India.” Apropos of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his brother records a saying of his that “no one

• He taught himself German and Portuguese while in the Amazons,

ought to make any pretensions to be considered a reader who had not twice gone through” that book. In connection with this, although departing for a moment from the order of time, it is interesting to note that the high estimate of Gibbon’s immortal work which he formed thus early was enhanced by his maturer judgment. For some months prior to his death his spare time at evening was given to the re-perusal of that book, and he had reached the middle of the last volume when death closed the unwearied eyes in “unawakening sleep.” He became “the old man eloquent” as he talked about the more suggestive chapters, and followed the great historian in his stately and well-ordered march through the most pregnant ages of the world’s history; while the majestic and luminous charm of the style made him turn back again and again to the finer passages. He expressed chronic irritation at Dean Milman’s notes, which, while they sought to qualify, failed to shake the accuracy of the statements or the general soundness of the conclusions of a work which Cardinal Newman has commended as the most adequate history of the Church yet written. Besides attending classes for languages and composition, Bates joined a glee club and learned to play the guitar, accompanying himself to favourite songs. His love of melody, whether in music or poetry, never left him, and on the rare occasions that his health permitted he refreshed himself at the opera; his catholic tastes enabling him to enjoy the music of composers as diverse as Wagner and Sullivan.

But above and outside the manifold studies that informed his boyhood, he was a born naturalist. Some kindred spirits whom he met at the Mechanics’ Institute—two of whom, Mr. John Plant, Curator of the Salford Museum, and his brother James, survive-quickened his zeal as a collector. Scouring the country round Leicester for specimens, he began, like most boys, with butterflies, then forsook these for beetles; sending accounts of his captures to the Zoologist, to the first number of which he contributed “ Notes on Coleopterous Insects frequenting damp places” (January 3rd, 1843, vol. i, p. 115): His “happy hunting grounds” were the lanes and recesses of Charnwood Forest, “owned by the old Earl of Stamford, who did not strictly preserve for game,” thus affording access to the woods and dells where insect life abounded; and there he gathered knowledge of wild flowers as well as prizes for his cabinets. Enlisting his brother Frederick, who is himself no undistinguished entomologist, as willing helper, he escaped to the

forest whenever the scant holidays of those pre-early-closing times permitted, and soon filled with specimens the drawers of the furniture in the little room which his father had “ apportioned to him as a study.” All the more important captures were described in detail as to species, habitat and circumstance, a practice which, no doubt, “contributed largely to his after facility in description, which was remarkable.” All that he did was done—as in well-nigh every branch of science the most important work has been done-with primitive apparatus, and with but slender help from without But therein lay the splendid schooling which developed capacity and resource, and gave us the Naturalist on the Amazons.

Alderman Gregory died before Bates’s term of apprenticeship had expired; and, as evidencing his mastery of aught that he undertook, he managed the business for a time on behalf of the son. He left it to take a clerkship, first at Messrs. Bedell’s, then at Messrs. Wheeler’s, and, finally, at Allsopp’s brewery at Burton-on-Trent. But the work was uncongenial; it fretted him, and aggravated his gastric trouble. As often as he could he escaped from the desk to the open air, and some results of his entomologising are found in a paper on “Coleoptera in the Neighbourhood of Burton-on-Trent,” published in the Zoologist (vol. vi., 1848, p- 1997). Mr. Edwin Brown,* who obtained him the situation at Allsopp’s, is referred to as the captor of several species scheduled in the paper. Among the friendships which Bates made in Leicester was one which had momentous influence on his future; namely, that of Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, then English master in the Collegiate School. Mr. Wallace tells us that he was at that time chiefly interested in botany, but afterwards took up _ beetle-collecting. Among an interesting batch of letters preserved by Bates are a few from Mr. Wallace, written between June 1845 and October 1847, after he had removed to Neath, in South Wales. If they do not indicate the celebrity to which their writer has attained, they show what ardour was imported into a pursuit, perseverance in which has given him a foremost place among biologists. In a letter dated November gth, 1845, Wallace asks Bates if he has read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (published in 1844), and a subsequent letter indicates that Bates had not formed a favourable opinion of that unsatisfactory, though useful, book—useful as opening people’s eyes to problems of the modifiability of species.

• See Bates’s letter to Darwin, infra, p. lxi.

This, from another letter, is interesting as an early estimate of Darwin: “I first read Darwin’s /ournal three or four years back, and have lately re-read it. As the journal of a scientific traveller, it is second only to Humboldt’s Personal Narrative; as a work of general interest, perhaps superior to it. He is an ardent admirer and most able supporter of Mr. Lyell’s views. His style of writing I very much admire, so free from all labour,* affectation, or egotism, yet so full of interest and original thought.”