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Vol. XLI. . GUELPH, AUGUST, 1909. No. 8. 



WILLIAM HENRY EDWARDS. 



For thirty years the name of Mr. William H. Edwards was familiar 

 in the scientific world as one of the two most notable students of the 

 Butterflies of North America, the other being the now venerable and 

 venerated Dr. Samuel H. Scudder, of Cambridge, Mass. Both of these 

 men spent the greater part of their lives in the preparation and production 

 of magnificent works on our diurnal Lepidoptera, to which we owe our 

 present knowledge, incomplete though it may be in many respects, of 

 these beautiful and interesting creatures. 



Mr. Edwards, born at Hunter, N. Y., on the 15th of March, 1822, 

 was the son of William W. and Helen Ann Mann Edwards. His father 

 was one of the fifteen children of Judge Timothy Edwards, whose grand- 

 father was the Rev. Jonathan Edwards, of Stockbridge, Mass., the progenitor 

 of many able contributors to American intellectual life. Mr. W.. W. 

 Edwards built a tannery at Northampton, Mass., in 1 794, and sent his leather 

 to' Boston; in 18 16, having exhausted the supply of hemlock bark in the 

 Connecticut valley, he removed to Hunter, in Greene Co., New York, and 

 re-established his business on the Schoharie Creek, where he drew his 

 supplies from an estate of 1,200 acres of hemlock forest in the Catskill 

 Mountains. Here our friend was born and brought up, spending his eaily 

 years in the midst of beautiful surroundings and imbibing a love of nature 

 which continued throughout his life. From the village school he was sent 

 to Williams College, Mass., and completed his course there in 1842; he 

 then studied law in New York, and was admitted to the bar in 1S47, after 

 which he made his home at Newburg, N. Y. Subsequently he became 

 interested in the coal fields of West Virginia, and removed to Coalburgh, 

 where he was President of the Ohio and Kanawha Coal Company. He 

 was an extensive land owner in the Virginias of the early days, a builder 

 of railroads, an opener of coal mines, and throughout all his life active in 

 the affairs of the community among whom he dwelt. Though thus busily 

 engaged in commercial pursuits, he always found time to devote to the 



