However, like Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer, he had a normal education to the age of about 13 when he became apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer.

He joined the Mechanics' Institute (which had a library), studied in his spare time and collected insects in Charnwood Forest.

[5] In 1847 Wallace and Bates discussed the idea of an expedition to the Amazon rainforest, the plan being to cover expenses by sending specimens back to London.

Bates spent the next three years writing his account of the trip, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, widely regarded as one of the finest reports of natural history travels.

He sold his personal Lepidoptera collection to Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin and began to work mostly on beetles (cerambycids, carabids, and cicindelids).

He describes Bates's 1861 paper on mimicry in Heliconiidae butterflies as "remarkable and epoch-making", with "a clear and intelligible explanation", briefly addressing its attackers as "persons who are more or less ignorant of the facts".

He then praises Bates's contributions to entomology, before regretting, in remarkably bitter words for an official obituary, that the "confinement and constant strain" of "mere drudgery of office work" for the Royal Geographical Society had with "little doubt ... weakened his constitution and shortened a valuable life".

[10] Henry Bates was one of a group of outstanding naturalist-explorers who were supporters of the theory of evolution by natural selection (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace 1858).

[11] Other members of this group included Joseph Dalton Hooker, Fritz Müller, Richard Spruce and Thomas Henry Huxley.

A common example seen in temperate gardens is the hover-fly, many of which – though bearing no sting – mimic the warning colouration of hymenoptera (wasps and bees).

[13] Bates noted of the Heliconids (long-wings) that they were forest dwellers which were: And yet, said Bates "I never saw the flocks of slow-flying Heliconidae in the woods persecuted by birds or dragonflies ... nor when at rest did they appear to be molested by lizards, or predacious flies of the family Asilidae [robber-flies] which were very often seen pouncing on butterflies of other families.

[14] Bates, Wallace and Müller believed that Batesian and Müllerian mimicry provided evidence for the action of natural selection, a view which is now standard amongst biologists.

[15] Field and experimental work on these ideas continues to this day; the topic connects strongly to speciation, genetics and development.

[16] Bates spent the best part of a year at Ega (now Tefé) in the Upper Amazon (Solimões),[17] where he reported that turtle was eaten regularly, and insect catches were especially abundant.