Born at Clapham the fourth child of Joseph A. Muir who held a post in Egypt and died at Alexandria in 1886. Frederick then had to leave school and joined the Eastern Telegraph Company subsequently being stationed in Aden, Mozambique, Lorenzo, Marques and Durban. At all these stations he collected insects in which he had been interested since childhood. While at Aden Muir met David Sharp whose daughter Ann he subsequently married. Sharp was instrumental in his leaving the telegraph service and joining the scientific staff of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association at Honolulu in 1905 under Dr R.C.L.Perkins. Here he rescued the plantations from attacks by pests ( indroduced accidentally without their control agents) by ‘travelling far and wide, facing sickness, hardships and savage tribes, to discover the native countries of these pests and their enemies and parasites... His ingenuity in introducing the controlling agents to the Hawaiian Islands is shown in the case of the fly parasitic upon the cane –borer weevil; finding it impossible, owing to the shortness of the fly’s life cycle, to import it direct from New Guinea to Honolulu, Muir established intermediate breeding stations in Australia and Fiji, and so, by breeding them through several generations on the way, transported the insects to their destination.’ (Times, 22 May 1931) Muir published more than 100 papers on entomology covering in particular the Hemiptera. The publication for which he is best known by Coleopterists is his joint article with David Sharp, written while he was on leave in England in 1911, entitled ‘The Comparative Anatomy of the Male Genital Tube in Coleoptera’, Trans.ESL, 1912, pp.477-642 and pls xlii-lxxviii, which was subsequently published as a book by the Entomological Society of America in 1969. The book also included six further articles by both authors which updated the work. Muir gave 19 boxes of exotic Coleoptera to Cambridge (Insect Department Register, 8 December 1922). There are also specimens bearing his name in the foreign collection of Butler at Norwich Museum (information from Tony Irwin). Muir’s son David wrote a biographical account of his father which, as far as I know, remains unpublished. I am very grateful to Mike Wilson for presenting this to me and will be happy to make the information contained in it available upon request.Correspondence including letters from his wife at the time of his death is in the RESL (Pedersen (2002) p. 91). There is an obituary in The Times, 22 May 1931. (MD 2/04, 11/09)
Dates
1872 - 13 May 1931