CONTRIBUTORS TO THE FIRST SERIES OF 'tHE IRIS.'' 3 83 



Mr. W. C. HEWITSON. 



William Chapman Hewitson, second son of Mr. Middleton 

 Hewitson, was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on January 9th, 

 1806. He was educated at Kirkby Stephen and York, 

 and subsequently articled to Mr. John Tuke, land-surveyor 

 of York, in which city he resided until at least 1828, 

 though he was practising his profession in his native city 

 in 1831. He shewed his love for Natural History at an 

 early age, for he occupied himself with oological and 

 entomological pursuits at school, continued them at York, 

 and published tiie first part of his ' British Oology' in 1831, 

 the last in 1838. In that year we find him employed by 

 Messrs. Sturges at Bristol in the survey of the Exeter and 

 Bristol Railway, but he was again in his native town in 

 1839. Among the friends of his youth were Messrs. Albany 

 and John Hancock, Joshua Alder, and William Hutton, 

 while his determination to produce a book on British 

 Oology as a sequel to YarrelPs ' History of British Birds ' 

 was strengthened, it not caused, by his visits to the 

 collection of Mr. R. R. Wingate, who set up so many of the 

 birds in the Museum at Newcastle. The second and third 

 editions of this work were entitled ' Coloured Illustrations 

 of the Eggs of British Birds '' and were issued in 1843-4 and 

 1856 respectively. At the same period we gather from the 

 pages of the ' Transactions of the Tyneside Naturalists' 

 Field Club' and the ^Natural History Transactions of 

 Northumberland and Durham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne ' 

 that he was by no means neglectful of the pursuit of 

 Entomology, and was amassing rich collections of British 

 Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. 



In February 1829 a few members of the Literary and 

 Philosophical Society at Newcastle banded themselves to- 

 gether to form a society for the study of Natural History, 



