Charles Swinhoe
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Colonel Charles Swinhoe (29 August 1836 - 2 December 1923[1]) M.A. (OXON.), F.L.S., F.Z.S., F.E.S., was an English naturalist and lepidopterist, who served in the British Army in India. He was one of the eight founders of the Bombay Natural History Society and a brother of the famous naturalist Robert Swinhoe.
Swinhoe joined the Army as an Ensign in the 56th Regiment of Foot at the age of 19, serving in the Crimea and reaching India after the 1857 Mutiny. He was at Kandahar with Lord Roberts in 1880, and collected 341 birds there and on the march back to India.
He was a shikari of the old school and had shot 50-60 tigers. He was a member of the British Ornithologists Union. He collected insects, chiefly Lepidoptera from Bombay, Poona, Mhow and Karachi Districts. He contributed papers to The Ibis on the birds of southern Afghanistan and central India, and donated 300 bird skins from each country to the British Museum. He also wrote to the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. He had one of the largest collections of Indian lepidoptera at the time (40,000 specimens of 7000 species and 400 new species described by him), and wrote two volumes on moths as part of the Lepidoptera indica series, which he completed after the death of Frederic Moore. He also wrote A revision of the genera of the family Liparidae which covered 1130 entries.
For his services to Entomology the University of Oxford conferred upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts, and the Entomological Society of France appointed him an Honorary Member. But until some future generation throws into the scrap heap our present system of nomenclature, Col. Swinhoe's name will be preserved as the describer of many new butterflies and moths, while many others have been named after him by the authors, who have wished to honour a name, that has been pre-eminent among Entomologists for many years.
—Anon[1]
[edit] Notes
[edit] External references
- Obituary in The Ibis 1924 pp. 362-3.
- Manuscript Collection
