Henry Herbert Lyman was born on December 21, 1854, in Montreal, Quebec.

He was a businessman and amateur entomologist. He studied at West End Academy, the Montreal High School, and McGill University (B.A. and M.A.). Together with his father Henry Lyman (1813-1897), they owned Lyman, Sons & Co., the largest pharmaceutical company in Canada. He served as the Governor of the Montreal General Hospital and the Director of the British and Colonial Press Service. He was also involved in the Royal Geographical Society. Despite his many business commitments, he still made time to follow his primary interest as a pioneer amateur entomologist, studying and collecting Lepidoptera. His extensive collection was bequeathed to McGill University where Lyman’s legacy lives on at the university through the Lyman Entomological Museum and Research Laboratory and the entomological literature collection, known as the Lyman Collection, housed at the Macdonald Campus Library.

In 1912, he married Florence Holwell Kirkby (1877–1914). They both perished on May 29, 1914, during the shipwreck of the Empress of Ireland in the Saint Lawrence River, the worst peacetime marine disaster in Canadian history.