Mainly a conchologist who lived in Orkney and worked for a firm of drapers in Kirkwall all his life. His obituary in Journal of Conchology, 26, 1968, pp.273-74 mentions that he made a collection of beetles as a boy. (Information from Geoff Hancock). (MD 11/04)

There are specimens bearing this name in Ellis’s foreign beetle collection in Liverpool Museum. (MD 11/04)

Well-known early naturalist who was primarily a botanist and who worked with Francis Willughby on Lepidoptera. His ‘Extract of a letter concerning spontaneous creation’ (Philos. Trans. 6(74), 1671, pp.2219-20) includes notes on some insects smelling of musk including Aromia moschata . (MD 11/04)

Stephens (1828) p.62 refers to captures by the late R.Rawlins in 1810. (MD 11/04)

First Professor of Entomology at the University of Queensland, Australia, who was born in England and after War work on wireworms became an advisory entomologist first at Long Ashton and then in the National Agricultural Advisory Service at Bristol working on the Cockchafer. He then spent 19 years at Rothamstead including a two year secondment to Ghana working mainly on soil insects, on the control and ecology of pests and on earthworms. He was the author of Life in the Soil and joint editor of Soil Ecology. He took up his post at Queensland six months before his death.

Born in Bedford to an English mother and American father. Lived in Tokyo, Japan as a teen-ager, where he first began collecting insects, before moving to the USA. Dr. Ratcliffe is Curator of the Division of Entomology and Professor at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln Nebraska, USA. Where he specialises in the taxonomy, biology, ecology, phylogeny, and biogeography of scarab beetles, especially those of the Neotropics. His research interests centre on dynastine scarab beetles of the world and the New World gymnetines (Cetoniinae).

A solicitor who spent his entire life in Sudbury, Suffolk. His obituary in Trans. Suffolk Nat. Soc., 6, 1947, p.lxv states ‘Just fifty years ago we began at first brisk correspondence with our Subject, then very keen on both Lepidoptera and Beetles, an exchange of specimens useful to us both, later he accorded more attention to Ornithology... He was a small and peculiarly quiet man, so retiring that he shrank from joining this Society when approached upon the subject in 1929’. (Information from Howard Mendel). (MD 11/04)

Stephens (1828), pp.55,60 refers to the collection of ‘Mr Raddon taken by Mr Gibbs’. (MD 11/04)

Published ‘Descriptions of and observations on the cock-chaffer in its grub and beetle states’ in Letters and Papers on Agriculture and Planting of the Bath Society, 1, 1792, p.258. There is an account of him in H.J.Rose, New Biographical Dictionary, 11, 1850, p 273 which I have not seen. I presume the date of his death as 1787 given by Gilbert (1977) is incorrect. (MD 11/04)