HEZEKIAH LINTHICUM

See also:

• HEZEKIAH LINTHICUM BATEMAN (1812–1875)

BATEMAN (1812–1875)  , American actor and manager, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 6th of December 1812 . He was intended for an engineer, but in 1832 became an actor, playing with Ellen Tree (afterwards Mrs Charles Kean) in juvenile leads . In 1855 he was manager of the St Louis theatre for a few years and in 1859 moved to New York . In 1866 he was manager for his daughter Kate, and in 1871 returned to London, where he took the Lyceum theatre . Here he engaged Henry Irving, presenting him first in The Bells, with great success . He died on the 22nd of March 1875• His wife, SIDNEY FRANCES (1823-1881), daughter of Joseph Cowell, an English actor who had settled in America, was also an actress and the author of several popular plays, in one of which, Self (1857), She and her husband made a great success . After her husband's death Mrs Bateman continued to manage the Lyceum till 1875 . She later took the Sadler's Wells theatre, which she managed until her death on the 13th of January 1881 . She was the first to bring to England an entire American company with an American play, Joaquin Miller's The Danites . Mr and Mrs Bateman had eight children, three of the four daughters being educated for the stage . The two oldest, Kate' Josephine (b . 1842), and Ellen (b .

1845), known as the" Bateman children," began their theatrical career at an

early age . In 186 2 Kate played in New York as Juliet and Lady Macbeth; and in of insects new to science . His long residence in the tropics, with the privations which it entailed, undermined his health . Nor had the exile from home the compensation of freeing him from financial cares, which hung heavy on him till he had the good fortune to be appointed in 1864 assistant-secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post which, to the inestimable gain of the society, and the advantage of a succession of explorers, to whom he was alike Nestor and Mentor, he retained till his death on the 16th of February 1892 . Bates is best known as the author of one of the most delightful books of travel in the English language, The Naturalist on the Amazons (1863), the writing of which, as the correspondence between the two has shown, was due to Charles Darwin's persistent urgency . " Bates," wrote Darwin to Sir Charles Lyell, " is second only to Humboldt in describing a tropical forest." But his most memorable contribution to biological science, and more especially to that branch of it which deals with the agencies of modification of organisms, was his paper on the " Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley," read before the Linnaean Society in 1861 . He therein, as Darwin testified, clearly stated and solved the problem of " mimicry," or the superficial resemblances between totally different species and the likeness between an animal and its surroundings, whereby it evades its foes or conceals itself from its prey . Bates's other contributions to the literature of science and travel were sparse and fugitive, but he edited for several years a periodical of Illustrated Travels . A man of varied tastes, he devoted the larger part of his leisure to entomology, notably to the classification of coleoptera . Of these he left an extensive and unique collection, which, fortunately for science, was purchased intact by Rene Oberthur of Rennes .