[1] Sclater received his Master of Arts degree in Natural Science from Keble College at Oxford in 1885.

He worked for two years as a Demonstrator at Cambridge under Professor Adam Sedgwick and went on a collecting trip to British Guiana in 1886.

In the same year, he received an appointment as a deputy superintendent of the Indian Museum in Calcutta from 1887 until 1891, when he joined the science faculty of Eton College.

[3] It was at Eton that he met his future wife, Charlotte Mellen Stephenson, an American divorcée whose two sons attended the school.

Here, Sclater took up the position of curator at the South African Museum, whose collections he reorganized and moved into a new facility.

Two years later, William Sclater died at St. George's Hospital, two days after a V-1 flying bomb fell over his home at 10 Sloane Court in Chelsea on Sunday, 2 July 1944.