OBITUARY. 



JOHN OBADIAH WESTWOOD. 



Born December 22, 1805. Died January 2, 1893, 



LAST month we chronicled the death of the veteran entomologist, 

 Mr. H. T. Stainton, and now we have to record the passing 

 away of a yet more venerable figure among British students of insect 

 life, Professor West wood, of Oxford. 



Westwood's native town was Sheffield; there, and at Lichfield, 

 whither his family afterwards removed, he was educated at private 

 schools. A strong taste for natural history, a marked aptitude for 

 drawing, a love for Lichfield Cathedral and its services, were charac- 

 teristics of his boyhood, and all three bore fruit in his after-life. On 

 leaving school Westwood was articled to a solicitor in London ; he 

 afterwards became a partner, but soon relinquished law to give 

 himself to his chosen studies — entomology and ecclesiastical art. 

 Known to naturalists throughout the world by his work on the former 

 subject, he has acquired a wide reputation among archaeologists by 

 his descriptions and beautifully executed copies of ancient Christian 

 MSS., and illuminations, ivories, and inscribed stones. His archaeo- 

 logical work was carried on concurrently with his entomology, from 

 the publication of the PalcBogvaphia Sacra Pidoria (1845) to the 

 Facsimiles of the Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS. 

 (1868), the Catalogue of the Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum 

 (1876), and the Lapidarium Wallice (1876-9). It is to his beautiful 

 draughtmanship that we probably owe the combination in Westwood 

 of two such apparently dissimilar lines of study as archaeology and 

 •entomology. 



His entomological writings date from 1827, when he began to 

 contribute papers on various orders of insects to different journals and 

 to the publications of the Linnean and other Societies. In 1837 he 

 published a new edition of Drury's figures of exotic insects, for which 

 he wrote descriptions. In 1838 appeared his Entomologist's Text- Book, 

 to be followed in the two following years by the two volumes of the 

 Introduction to the Modern Classification of Insects. 



This latter work is one of the classics of British entomology, and 

 no later work on insects generally, published in England, has been 

 able to supersede it. Many of its speculations seem strange to 

 naturalists reared in modern days, as the arrangement of the insect 



