184 Linnean Society. [May 24, 



vate tutor at Cambridge, and subsequently again sent to Eton, from 

 ■whence he returned to Cambridge, and was entered as a Fellow 

 Commoner of Queen's College, his intended destination being the 

 Church. Marrying, at the age of 21, Anna, the grand-daughter of 

 Governor Holroyd, one of the survivors of the black-hole of Cal- 

 cutta, his wife's ill-health and subsequent early death induced him 

 to abandon his intended plan of life, and to visit first Portugal and 

 afterwards Canada and the United States. On his return to Europe 

 he became a Captain in the West Kent Militia, but was compelled 

 by ill-health to quit the service in 1803, and attaching himself to 

 scientific pursuits he became in 1807 a Fellow of the Royal Society. 

 In 1808 or 1809 he made a tour in Spain, and visited the celebrated 

 quicksilver mines of Almaden. Soon after his return he married a 

 second time, but lost his wife in about eight months after his mar- 

 riage. At this period he devoted himself earnestly to science, and 

 constructed his two great voltaic batteries, of which he gave an ac- 

 count in two papers read to the Royal Society in 1808 and 1815. 

 In the year 1816 the failure of the Tunbridge Bank, in which his 

 father v/as a partner, having brought with it the loss of all his ex- 

 tensive property, Mr. Children was, through the kindness of Lord 

 Camden, appointed an Assistant-Librarian of the British Museum, 

 first in the Department of Antiquities, and subsequently in that of 

 Natural History, in which latter capacity the Zoological Collections 

 were placed under his especial charge. His father died in 1818, and 

 in 1819 he married for the third time. In 1837 he was appointed 

 to the Office of Keeper of Zoology in the British Museum, which he 

 held until 1839, when the death of his wife, which had taken place 

 a short time previously, added to his own enfeebled health, induced 

 him to resign. On the election of the Duke of Sussex to the Pre- 

 sidency of the Royal Society in 1830, he succeeded Colonel Sabine 

 as one of the Secretaries, and continued to hold that office until 

 1837. His election into the Linnean Society dates from 1807, and 

 in 1834 the Duke of Somerset nominated him to be one of the Vice- 

 Presidents. In 1833-4 he was one of the principal founders, and 

 became the first President, of the Entomological Society. His col- 

 lection of insects had at this period, by the purchase of that of Count 

 Bilberg and by other important additions, become one of the most 

 extensive in England, and was much consulted by entomologists, 

 both native and foreign. From the time of his quitting the Museum 

 he resided chiefly with his only child, a daughter by his first marriage, 

 who liad become the wife of the only surviving son of Mr. Alder- 

 man Atkins, at Ilalstead Place, near Sevenoaks in Kent ; and for the 



