Very little biographical information about Duncan appears to have been published and no obituary notices are recorded. He is chiefly remembered for the entomological volumes he wrote for W. Jardine's Naturalists Library including the volume on Beetles, first published in 1835, and subsequently re-issued under the title Beetles British and Foreign containing a full description of the more important varieties (no date but probably 1880s). Apart from these works the only other publications on Coleoptera by him to which I have seen references are: ‘Catalogue of the Coleopterous insects found in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh’, in Memoirs of the Wernerian Society, 6, 1832, pp.443-538, and Entomologia Edinensis, 1834, written with James Wilson. The former increased the Edinburgh list published by Charles Stewart in 1809, which included a little over 100 species, to 545, and the latter increased this further to 640. In the Introduction to the Entomologia Edinensis, Duncan and Wilson state that they had recorded from Scotland, as opposed to the Edinburgh district, nearly one half of the 3298 species listed by Stevens in his Systematic Catalogue, 1829. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that when Andrew Murray came to write his Catalogue of the Coleoptera of Scotland, 1853, he makes no mention at all of Duncan in an extensive list of acknowledgments. (MD 9/02)