168 THE ENTOMOLOGIST. 



of £3000, he has left to the Natural History Society of his 

 native town ; and the bulk of his considerable fortune is 

 bequeathed to various charities and in legacies to his 

 numerous friends. 



His weak health and the seclusion of his life may perhaps 

 have created what to strangers would appear a tinge of 

 sourness in his disposition ; whilst a natural slowness to 

 accept new ideas may have led others to impute to him 

 some degree of narrow-mindedness. But in truth he was of 

 a gentle, kindly, and generous nature; and those who knew 

 him best will most deeply mourn his loss, if not a great 

 man, he was at least a good one. 



But it is rather with the entomologist than the man that 

 we have here to deal. It cannot indeed be said of Hewitson 

 that he exhibited any breadth of view in scientific matters, 

 or did much to advance the philosophy of Natural History, 

 or to increase our knowledge of the economy even of his 

 favourite group. Confining himself exclusively to a single 

 section of a single order of insects, his writings contain little 

 on the habits of the Rhopalocera he figured, little on classifi- 

 cation or distribution, little on any of the interesting questions 

 and speculations that give life and charm to Natural Science 

 of the modern school. For these reasons he cannot be placed 

 in the front rank of entomologists; and in truth he never 

 aimed to be more than a describer and faithful depicter of 

 species discovered by others. He was a great lover of 

 Nature and of the beauties of natural scenery, yet he was 

 emphatically a student of the cabinet. His figures, 

 admirable as they are, are the figures of so many butter- 

 flies taken out of a drawer, — all wings, set out with 

 provoking uniformity, no leg or palpus visible, no details 

 of structure, without any idea of life; they seem to tell 

 their own tale that they were painted by one who had 

 never seen them in their native haunts, who knew them 

 only as cabinet specimens. But in spite of this want of 

 animation, in his own line as a pictorial describer of butter- 

 flies Hewitson stands unrivalled; and whether we look to the 

 folio plates of the Genera, or the quarto illustrations of Exotic 

 Butterflies and of the Lyc<Dnid(e, he is fairly entitled to the 

 highest praise, as well ibr the accuracy and carefulness of his 

 work, and the excellence and beauty of his colouring, as for 

 the patient perseverance with which, for more than thirty 

 years, he followed out his plans. 



His epitaph must stand— " Papilionum Pictor, et pictor 



PRiECELLENS." J. W. DUNNING. 



