OBITUARY. 231 
@ BITUARY. 
Roland Trimen, F.R.S. 
Roland Trimen, M.A., F'.R.S., the last of that small band of great 
naturalists headed by Darwin and Wallace, was taken from us on July 
25th, and all who knew him cannot but mourn that we shall here meet 
him no more. The third of a family of four sons (of whom one had 
similar tastes, Dr. Henry Trimen, F.R.S., for many years director of 
the celebrated gardens at Peradeniya), he was educated first at a private 
school and then at King’s College School. Delicacy of the throat 
showed itself at an early age and involved a voyage to the Cape before 
he was 20 years old. The next year (1860) he entered the Cape Colony 
Civil Service, and returned there to take up the study of the insect 
fauna of that region, a study that his early doings at Dorking had 
already shown he was eminently fitted to undertake. His two greatest 
works are, without doubt, his famous paper read before the Linnean 
Society, on March 5th, 1868, but not published till 1869, on the Bio- 
nomics of Papilio merope, or as he himself called it, “on some remark- 
able mimetic analogies among African Butterflies.’ This paper, now 
a classic, was received with little less than scorn by the then opponents 
of the Darwinian theory, and certainly with more opposition than were 
those by Bates and by Wallace, seven and four years previously. We 
in these days cannot understand the dislike and even bitterness of that 
controversy, that has ended in the triumph of our great predecessors in 
entomology. This was followed later on in life by his three volume 
monograph on ‘‘ South African Butterflies,” in which, however, he was 
ably lieutenanted by his friend Colonel Bowker. Had he done nothing 
else, these are two works that are going to last. In addition to these, 
however, are his first separate work, “‘ Rhopalocera Africe Australis,” 
besides many papers in the Trans. Hint. Soc. Lond, and elsewhere. 
He was appointed Curator of the South Afriean Museum at Cape 
Town, in 18738, and retired from that post in 1895. He was delegate 
to many congresses on the Phylloxera Pest, and in 1889 he was the 
Cape delegate to the first International Congress of Zoology that met 
in Paris, and there he met Miss Blanche Bull, who became his wife, 
and to whom our deepest sympathy and condolence is offered. 
He served on the Council of the Entomological Society for several 
periods, and was President in 1897 and 1898, his addresses on 
“* Mimicry”’ and ‘‘ Seasonal Dimorphism ” being most valuable con- 
tributions on these subjects, and greatly enhanced by his own personal 
observations during the long period of his residence in South Africa. 
In 1883 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1910 he 
received the Darwin Medal. 
Thoroughness was a conspicuous element in his character, and it 
was this thoroughness that compelled his retirement from his office 
before the official age limit in 1895, inasmuch as the vineyards of the 
Cape were suffering most severely from Phylloxera, and his arduous’ 
work in examining them day after day and week after week, in the 
burning February sun, so seriously affected his health, never at any 
time robust, that it became necessary for him to return to England 
permanently. 
It is not given to many men to have such versatility as he had, 
