240 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 
OBITUARY. 
Ropanp Trimen, F.R.S., F.E.S. 
Born 1840. Died 1916. 
Amona the older school of entomologists none has left a more 
enduring fame in the sphere of his own particular operations than 
Roland Trimen. Leaving King’s College School, he entered the 
Cape Civil Service as long ago as 1860, at a time when Cape Colony 
and Natal were the lonely British ‘“ white ’’ provinces of South 
Africa under the Union Jack; and as little was known of the fauna 
and flora beyond the Orange River and the Limpopo as of the native 
tribes. The period of his activities in the world of Nature coincides 
with the development of the British Empire, politically speaking, 
from the Cape to the Zambesi, and he retired from his service on the 
eve of the events which led up to the great war and final consolida- 
tion of South Africa as we know it to-day. If Moore was the father 
of Indian lepidopterology, Trimen will be remembered as the father 
of South African lepidopterology. His published works on the 
subject began within two years of his arrival with ‘“ Rhopalocera 
Africe Australis; a Catalogue of South African Butterflies,” pub- | 
lished in London 1862-1866, followed twenty years later by the 
splendid and comprehensive ‘South African Butterflies; a Mono- 
graph of the Extra-tropical Species,’ 1887-1889. During the 
interval he also contributed numerous papers of special value on 
the same and kindred subjects to the ‘ Transactions’ of the Entomo- 
gical, Linnean, and Zoological Societies. To employ a well-known 
phrase, he may indeed be said to have taught British entomologists to 
think in continents, and upon the foundations well and truly laid by 
his industry has been erected the structure of scientific knowledge, 
advanced to later perfection by the able naturalists whose African 
explorations have revealed the entomological mysteries and beauties 
of the once ‘“ Dark Continent.” In 1881 he represented Great 
Britain as sole Commissioner to the Bordeaux Phylloxera Congress. 
As Curator of the South African Museum, Cape Town, from 1873 to 
1895, he was also exceptionally well placed to pursue his favourite 
lines of research in insect mimicry, and in 1883 he was elected a 
Fellow of the Royal Society; while he had returned but two years 
to London when the Entomological Society elected him their Presi- 
dent (1897-98) ; his term of office being crowned the year following 
by Oxford conferring upon him the “ naturalists’” degree of M.A., 
honoris causa. In 1910 he received the Darwin medal, in recognition 
of his merit as associate and fellow-worker of Darwin himself. Nor 
was it until the Congress of Entomology at Oxford in 1912 that we 
heard for the first time that his strength was failing. From that 
time onward his public appearances became fewer and fewer, to 
the deep regret of friends entomological and otherwise, but he 
retained a lively interest in his own particular subject to the last. 
Besides being a man of strikingly handsome appearance—he might 
have sat for the bust of the Olympian Zeus without the severity— 
he ever maintained a grand simplicity and gentleness of nature, 
combined with a charm of manner which all those of us who were 
privileged to know him shall not soon forget. To his widow we 
offer our sincerest sympathy in her bereavement. H. B.-B. 
