Born in Somers Town the son of James Edward Waterhouse, a Solicitor’s Clerk and keen entomologist. Commenced his career as an architect but pursued natural history and particularly entomology as a hobby no doubt as a result of the influence of his father. He is mentioned frequently by Stephens (1828) and when the ESL started in 1833 he was appointed the first curator. There is some debate as to who exactly was responsible for founding the ESL but in Proc.ESL, 1888, p.lxxvi, C.O.Waterhouse attributed it to an idea put forward in his own home by his father. He quotes from one of his father’s notebooks: ‘Full of the idea, I went to Mr Hope next day... and told him, and he immediately communicated with some leading entomologists. A meeting was called at the Thatched House Tavern, St. James’s Street, soon afterwards (May 22nd, 1833), and I was elected Honorary Curator.’ Finding curatorship to his liking, Waterhouse appears to have given up architecture in 1835 in order to accept the position of Curator to the Museum of the Royal Institute at Liverpool, a post which he held for only a few months before he moved back to London as Curator of the ZSL. By the Spring of the following year he had completed a Catalogue of the Mammals, which was not published until 1838, because of debate over the system of classification which he had used. This is interesting because Darwin had entrusted to him many of the mammals and insects he had collected on the Beagle voyage and which Waterhouse subsequently wrote up. These publications included six articles on his beetles published 1838-45.(see Darwin, C.) In 1851 he succeeded Konig as Keeper of the Mineralogical branch of the Natural History Department at the British Museum. This department included fossils and one of his publications in this role included Archaeopteryx which he had found when inspecting fossil collections on a visit to Germany. Of Waterhouse’s 117 or so scientific publications (many illustrated by himself) 60 notes and articles and 2 catalogues concerned Coleoptera. The Catalogue of British Coleoptera, 1858 (a separate version printed on one side only for labelling collections also printed) and a Pocket Catalogue of British Coleoptera, 1861, were particularly useful in that they sorted out some of the synonymies in Stephens’ earlier works. His first note ‘Monographia Notiophilon Angliae’ appeared in Ent.Mag., 1, 1833, pp.202-211, and his last, on two new species of British Aleochara, in Trans.ESL., 2, Proc. 1864, p.10. He was wide ranging in his interests writing on many families from the Carabids to the weevils and described new species from all over the world. The sudden cessation of his publishing activities on beetles appears to be due to the huge amount of work in which he was involved in the design and building of the new museum at South Kensington (Alfred Waterhouse, the architect, was not a relative as far as I know) and the subsequent moving of the collections there. This caused him considerable anxiety and led to his resignation in 1880. There are some drawings of insects by Waterhouse in ‘Templeton’s’ scrapbook in the RESL library (Pedersen (2002) p.46. FESL (President 1849-50. Hon.FLSL. FZS (Vice President 1862-63). (MD 12/04)
Dates
6 March 1810 – 21 January 1888