Henry Walter Bates 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, he had sent back over 14,712 species (mostly insects) of which 8,000 were (according to Bates) new to science. Bates wrote up his findings in the work The Naturalist on the River Amazons
Sir Samuel White Baker was and English explorer, officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer and abolitionist. He also held the titles of Pasha and Major-General in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt
Hugh Cuming was an English collector who was interested in natural history, particularly in conchology and botany. He has been described as the 'Prince of Collectors'. Born in England, he spent a number of years in Chile, where he became a successful businessman. He used the money he saved to buy a ship that was specifically built for collecting specimens, and travelled extensively on collecting trips amassing many thousands of specimens. After his death, much of his material was bought by the Natural History Museum. A number of species are named after him
Christian Anton Goering was a German naturalist, painter and graphic artist who spent several years in Venezuela. He learned taxidermy from his father, who was a member of several ornithological societies. It was at a meeting of one of these societies that he met Christian Ludwig Brehm who helped him obtain a position at the Ornithological Museum of the University of Halle, where he worked under the direction of Hermann Burmeister. From 1856 to 1858, they travelled in South America and he decided to pursue his interests in natural history. He also went to London, where he took lessons from the zoological artist Joseph Wolf. While he was there, the Secretary of the Zoological Society, Philip Lutley Sclater, asked him to go to Venezuela to collect specimens for the British Museum
Sir Frederick John Jackson was an English administrator, explorer and ornithologist. Jackson joined the British Ornithologists' Union in 1888. That year a paper by Jackson and Captain Shelley was published describing birds collected during his 1884-1886 trip to Africa. He collected many specimens in an 1898-1891 expedition to Uganda, and descriptions of this collection were published in a five-part paper in the Ibis in 1891-1892. Other papers described new species appeared in the Ibis and other journals between 1890 and 1917. Jackson was elected President of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society in 1910. He wrote nine of the nineteen chapters of Big Game Shooting, published in 1894. After retiring he worked on a complete history of the Birds of East Africa and Uganda, which was unpublished when he died in 1929, following pneumonia. The Birds of Kenya Colony and the Uganda Protectorate was completed by William Lutley Sclater
Ronald Mathias Lockley was a Welsh ornithologist and naturalist. He wrote over 50 books on natural history, including a major study of shearwaters. He is perhaps best known for his book The Private Life of the Rabbit
Osbert Salvin was an English naturalist, ornithologist and herpetologist, best known for co-authoring Biologia Centrali-Americana (1879-1915) with Frederick DuCane Godman. In 1871 Salvin became editor of The Ibis. He was appointed to the Strickland Curatorship in the University of Cambridge, and produced his Catalogue of the Strickland Collection. He was one of the original members of the British Ornithologists' Union. He produced the volumes on the Trochilidae and Procellariidae in the Catalogue of Birds in the British Museum. One of his last works was the completion of Lord Lilford's Coloured Figures of British Birds (1897). Salvin was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Linnean, Entomogical and Zoological Society of London. At the time of his death he was Secretary of the British Ornithologists' Union.
George Brettingham Sowerby II was a British naturalist, illustrator and conchologist. Together with his father, George Brettingham Sowerby I, he published the Thesaurus Conchyliorum and other illustrated works on molluscs. He was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society on 7th May 1844. He was the father of George Brettingham Sowerby III, also a malacologist
William Bernhardt Tegetmeier was an English naturalist, a founding member of the Savage Club, a popular writer and journalist of domestic science. A correspondent and friend of Charles Darwin, Tegetmeier studied pigeon breeds and the optimality of hexagonal honeycomb cells constructed by honeybees. He wrote a number of books dealing with home economics, poultry farming, pigeon breeds, bee-keeping and on the maintenance of livestock
Jules Pierre Verreaux was a French botanist and ornithologist, and a professional collector and trader in natural history specimens. Verreaux worked for the family business, Maison Verreaux, established in 1803 by his father, Jacques Philippe Verreaux, which was the earliest known company that dealt in objects of natural history. The company funded collection expeditions to various parts of the world