320 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



OBITUARY. 



Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe, F.L.S., &c, was born at Penzance 

 on Sept. 1st, 1813, and died at Brighton on June 20th, 1893. He was 

 educated at the Grammar School of his native town, and subsequently 

 entered at St. Bartholomew's Hospital as a student. He was admitted 

 M.R.C.S. in 1835, and soon afterwards obtained an appointment in the 

 Navy as Surgeon, serving on the Australian, West Indian, and Mediter- 

 ranean stations. In 1843 he married Miss Glasson, of Falmouth, and retired 

 from the service, settling near St. Austell, in the vicinity of which he had 

 a property producing Kaolin (China clay). He was left a widower in 1851, 

 and then settled permanently in London, and devoted his attention entirely 

 to Entomology and Natural History generally. But until lately he travelled 

 much, either alone or in the company of one or more of his daughters, and 

 in this way he traversed nearly over the whole of Europe, North Africa, &c, 

 and once made a voyage to the Lower Amazons to make personal acquaintance 

 with the natural marvels of that rich region. As a writer he commenced 

 with a botanical paper in Henfrey's 'Botanical Gazette,' in 1850, 

 enumerating unrecorded Cornish plants. But he mainly devoted himself 

 to Coleoptera, commencing with the Longicorns, on which he published 

 much, including ' Longicornia Malayana,' enumerating and describing the 

 species collected by Wallace, which formed vol. iii. of the third series of the 

 Trans. Ent. Soc. Lond., 1864 — 1869, containing 712 pp. with twenty-four 

 coloured plates. Subsequently the Colydiidae and cognate groups, and still 

 later the Curculionidae, engaged his attention, and the number of his pub- 

 lished papers on Coleoptera is very great. His collections of Coleoptera he 

 sold to the British Museum not long before his death, when ill health warned 

 him that he could make no further use of them ; we believe they contained 

 above 2500 type specimens of species described by him. For many years he 

 had also accumulated an enormous mass of materials illustrative of a ' Systema 

 Naturae.' His active mind was never at rest, and latterly he published 

 many small works on the animal kingdom, the most important being the 

 second edition of his ' Zoological Classification ' (1880), in which an enormous 

 amount of information is compressed into a small compass. He joined the 

 Entomological Society of London in 1854, and was President in 1864-65, 

 and there was scarcely any more regular attendant at the meetings ; was a 

 member of the Entomological Society of France since 1862 ; and belonged 

 also to the Belgian, Stettin, and other foreign Societies. He became a 

 Fellow of the Linnean Society in 1852, and was for many years on the 

 Council of the Ray Society and the Scientific Committee of the Royal 

 Horticultural Society. It may be said of him that he was never happy 

 save in the company of naturalists. — Abridged from the * Entomologist's 

 Monthly Magazine. 1 



