166 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



OBITUARY. 



William Chapman Hewitson. — Born at Newcasile-upou- 

 Tyiie, on the 9tb January, 1806; died at Oatlands, VValton- 

 on-Thames, on the ^Slh May, 1878. 



Educated at York, and brought up as a land surveyor, 

 the early days of railway enterprise found Hewitson at 

 work under George Stephenson ; and he was for some time 

 engaged on the London and Birmingham Railway. But 

 delicate healtli and the possession of competent means 

 combined to induce him to abandon active employment of 

 this nature. Leaving his northern home he resided for a 

 time at Bristol, thence moved to Flampstead ; and finally, in 

 1848, he purchased some ten or twelve acres of Oatlands 

 Park, and built the house in which his last thirty years were 

 spent. He joined the Entomological Society in 1846, the 

 Zoological in 1859, and the Linnean in 1862. 



In early life he collected British Coleoptera and Ijepi- 

 doptera, and his name is not unfrequently mentioned in 

 Stephens's Illustrations; but for some years he devoted his 

 attention principally to the study of birds' eggs; and in 1833 

 he made a trip to Norway to discover the breeding places of 

 some of our migratory species. A few notes from his pen on 

 the Ornithology of Norway will be found in the second volume 

 of Jardine's 'Magazine of Zoology;' and other notes on 

 ornithological or oological subjects appeared from time to 

 time in the ' Ibis,' the ' Zoologist,' and other periodicals. 

 But in this branch of Science, as afterwards in Entomology, 

 it was by his pencil and brush, rather than his pen, that he 

 achieved distinction ; and for accuracy of delineation and 

 careful colouring of the eggs his ' British Oology' has never 

 been surpassed. 



The earliest of Hewitson's entomological notes was on the 

 economy ot Hedychrum {('hrysidit/ic), and appeared in the 

 'Entomological Magazine' lor 1837. In the summer of 

 1845 he made an excursion in the Alps, and the result was 

 some "Remarks on the Butterflies of Switzerland" (ZooU iii. 

 991). From the lime of his settling near London, with the 

 facility he thereby acquired for studying Ibreign species, his 

 passion for Diurnal Lepidoptera developed itself, and he may 

 he said to have devoted the rest of his life to the description 

 and figuring of species of exotic butterflies. 



It is needless to say that Doubleday and Westwood's 

 magnificent work, 'The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera' 

 (2 vols., folio, 1846 — 52), was illustrated by Hewitson. This 

 was followed by ' Illustrations of Exotic Butterflies' (5 vols., 



