48 Obituary notice of the late Mr. L. de Niceville. [March, 



the purpose of defraying the cost of publication of Sir George King's 

 Materials for a Flora of the Malayan Peninsula. 



Mr. F. Finn read an obituary notice of the late Mr. L. de Niceville. 



By the death of Charles Lionel Augustus de Niceville, Entomo- 

 logist to the Government of India the world of science loses a brilliant 

 and successful worker. He was born in 1852, and came of a noble 

 Huguenot family long domiciled in England, and was the last baron of 

 his line. His father was a member of the medical profession. He was 

 educated at St. John's College at Hurst Pier Point, near Brighton, and 

 gave early evidence of entomological tastes, as a schoolfellow informs 

 US that he spent all his spare time in studying insects instead of parti- 

 cipating in the ordinary school games. After leaving school he was 

 for some time employed in a bank, but came out to India, and held non- 

 gazetted appointments from 1876, his last one being that of Clerk of 

 the Calcutta Small Cause Court, in which employment he was well 

 known for many years in Calcutta. His holidays and daily leisure he 

 employed in the Study of Oriental butterflies, on which he was recog- 

 nized as the greatest authority. His papers on this subject were over 

 50 in number, and were of the very greatest importance, as he was a 

 naturalist of the all-round type, not only studying his specimens in the 

 cabinet but collecting largely for himself, and devoting much attention 

 to breeding. By this method he experimentally proved that in no less 

 than four cases seasonal forms of the same butterfly had been wrongly 

 separated as species, and by applying this knowledge was able greatly to 

 to elucidate the history of their forms. He described many new species 

 of butterflies and contributed much to our knowledge of the distribu- 

 tion of these insects, travelling in the course of his entomological 

 researches far and wide in the east, from Ladakh to Japan and Sumatra. 

 His researches were carried on for many years in a room allotted to him 

 in the Indian Museum, where he kept his very fine and extensive collec- 

 tion, which has lately been acquired by purchase by that institution. 

 It was his custom to daily resort to the museum for two or three hour's 

 study before breakfast, and thus he was able to get through a great 

 amount of work during the many years in which he pursued his 

 studies. , 



His results were published in several scientific Journals, especially 

 in those of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and of the Bombay Natural 

 History Society. Of both of these he was a member, in the latter case 

 an honorary corresponding one, and he served them loyally and well. 

 More than once he officiated as Natural History Secretary to the Asiatic 

 Society, and once as the Secretary for Anthropology, and from his long 



