[H. W. Bates, naturalist and explorer] Autograph Letter Signed H.W. Bates to Piffard [Bernard Piffard, companion to Bates (and perhaps A.R. Wallace) in S. America (see Notes below)] reviving acquaintance with recollection.

Two pages, 12mo, bifolium, fold marks, good condition. With envelope addressed by Bates to Piffard (Royal Geographical Society insignia). Text: It gave me great pleasure to find that you had not forgotten me. Your memory with us is kept alive by occasional news of you given to us by Dr or Mrs Knaggs [see Note below]. Thankls for the Report of your Nat.Hist. Society. The accounts of your excursions are extremely interesting & I have found much that is new to me in the explanation of ancient British place-names given by the local antiquarians who guided your parties. It is not often that one finds anything so well worth reading as the reports of local societies. | I still go on with the study of coleoptera & shall be very glad of the Texan speciment [...]. Notes: a.Piffard was a relatively well-to-do man who involved himself in many projects. His parents were avid entomologists, so he spent a lot of his youth in pursuit of insect specimens. Later, he travelled through Europe, India, and Canada, and accompanied Henry Bates on his excursions in South America. He settled down back in England, married and became a Baptist minister. For many years, he lived and preached in Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, and explored the local lands and its insect and plant inhabitants. During the early 1880s, Piffard began producing microscope slides on a commercial scale. These were primarily of botanical subjects, although he mounted a few insect specimens and produced a series of human pathological slides during 1889. His slide-making venture appears to have ended in 1889. After a considerable lapse, Piffard advertised slides of fungal spores in 1907. The majority of Bernard Piffard's slides that are encountered today probably date from his ca. 1883 to ca. 1889 period. [microscopist.net]; b. 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 after a full eleven years, he had sent back over 14,712 species (mostly of insects) of which 8,000 were (according to Bates, but see Van Wyhe new to science.[2] Bates wrote up his findings in his best-known work, The Naturalist on the River Amazon ; c. [Knaggs = Henry Guard Knaggs (21 March 1832 – 16 January 1908) one of the best known Victorian entomologists and the author of The Lepidopterist's Guide (1869)[Wikipedia].