FLY TIMES Supplement 2, September, 2018 Stephen D. Gaimari, editor Plant Pest Diagnostics Branch California Department of Food & Agriculture 3294 Meadowview Road Sacramento, California 95832, USA Tel: (916) 262-1131 FAX: (916) 262-1190 Email: [email protected] Welcome to the second Supplement issue of Fly Times! I am very pleased to have started this series, as it will facilitate distribution of larger works such as this one. Please let me encourage you to consider contributing to both the regular Fly Times, and if you are so inclined, to the Fly Times Supplement series. The Fly Times comes out twice a year – April and October (although usually late it seems!), while the Supplement can come out any time. Both this Supplement, and the first one in 2017, are historical in nature, focused on the life and times of dipterists of the past. Future Supplement issues can be historical like this one, or focused on any other dipterological topic, from original research, to travelogues and collecting adventures, to larger taxon-focused themes. The electronic version of the Fly Times continues to be hosted on the North American Dipterists Society website at http://www.nadsdiptera.org/News/FlyTimes/Flyhome.htm, as is the Fly Times Supplement series. Also note, the Directory of North American Dipterists is constantly being updated. Please check your current entry and send all corrections (or new entries) to Jim O’Hara – see the form for this on the last page. Issue No. 61 of the Fly Times will appear very soon, hopefully around the end of next month. Please send your contributions by email to the editor at [email protected]. All contributors for the next Fly Times should aim for mid October 2018 (maybe then I'll get an issue out actually on time!), but as usual, I will send a reminder. And articles after mid October are OK too! Articles for the Fly Times Supplement can be submitted at any time. *************************************** Supplement 2, available online 27 September 2018 CONTENTS Evenhuis, N.L. — The Life and Work of Francis Walker (1809–1874) .................................... 1–101 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 2 2. Background and Early Years ................................................................................................ 3–6 3. Edward Newman, the Entomological Club, and Entomological Colleagues ..................... 7–11 4. Early Publications, Travel, and Family Life ..................................................................... 12–19 5. Cataloguing the British Museum Insect Collections: the Good and the Bad ................... 20–37 Hymenoptera ........................................................................................................................ 32 Diptera ............................................................................................................................ 32–33 Homoptera ............................................................................................................................ 33 Neuroptera ............................................................................................................................ 34 Lepidoptera .................................................................................................................... 34–35 Hemiptera ....................................................................................................................... 35–36 Blattariae .............................................................................................................................. 36 Dermaptera Saltatoria.................................................................................................... 36–37 6. Other Publication Projects ................................................................................................ 38–43 Insecta Britannica .......................................................................................................... 38–40 Insecta Saundersiana...................................................................................................... 40–42 Other Papers .................................................................................................................. 42–43 7. Zoocecida and Plant-Insect Interactions ........................................................................... 44–45 8. The Sale of Specimens to Australia .................................................................................. 46–48 9. Walker and Biogeography ................................................................................................ 49–50 10. Later Years and Trouble with Publishers ....................................................................... 51–52 Unpublished Manuscripts ..................................................................................................... 52 11. Putting Walker’s Taxonomic Ability in Context ............................................................ 53–54 12. Walker and Religion, Cosmology, and Science ............................................................. 55–56 13. Walker’s Collections and Types ..................................................................................... 57–60 14. Postscript: “Something of a Mystic” .................................................................................... 61 15. Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................ 62 16. References ....................................................................................................................... 63–75 Appendix I. Complete bibliography of Francis Walker ..................................................... 76–100 Appendix II. Genealogy of the Walker-Ford Families ............................................................. 101 SUBMISSION FORM, DIRECTORY OF NORTH AMERICAN DIPTERISTS ................................................ 102 *************************************** Fly Times, Supplement 2 1 The Life and Work of Francis Walker (1809–1874) Neal L. Evenhuis J. Linsley Gressitt Center for Entomological Research, Bishop Museum, 1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, Hawaii 96817, USA; [email protected] 27 September 2018 2 Fly Times, Supplement 2 “If the fame of Mr. Walker as a first-rate entomologist was not already firmly established, this work would secure it for him, replete, as it is, with valuable information, guarded by scientific accuracy.” — Rev. F.O. Morris, 1856, reviewing volume III of Insecta Britannica “But what arrogance to coin original forms, some of which sound like childish babbling and which offer so few clues for the memory that their creator himself must have forgotten them within the next quarter-of-an-hour, and to expect that lepidopterists should sanction such garbage!” — P. Zeller, 1872, translation of a review of Walker’s Lepidoptera works. 1. Introduction The diametrically opposed quotes above typify the irony of comments from colleagues with regard to the writings of British entomologist Francis Walker1. It is odd indeed that someone who was kept in high esteem by one group of entomologists could be at the same time be vilified by others. The Victorian era in Britain saw a dramatic rise in interest in natural history through collecting and/or purchase of specimens and the resultant beginnings of many entomological societies allowing a medium within which its members could gather, socialize, share anecdotes, and exchange observations with like-minded colleagues, as well as examine interesting recently collected specimens. At this same time, the collections of the British Museum were undergoing significant changes, both of size and quality with the construction of additions to and larger buildings at the Bloomsbury facility and the hiring of keepers and assistants for proper curation of its holdings. With continual and significant increases in its holdings of specimens and artifacts through the results of exploratory and scientific voyages and through donations and purchases from private collections, the task of taking inventory of the zoological specimens in the museum via “lists of specimens” and “catalogues2” became a necessary priority. Francis Walker was one the early members of some of those first entomological societies and also one of the major contributors to the enormous task of inventorying and cataloguing the various orders of insects in the British Museum. During his career, my scouring his works page-by-page show that he described 23,626 species as new to science, almost 16,000 of them described during his cataloguing of the British Museum collections. Ohl (2018) calculated that he described about 560 species per year. He was one of the most prolific of describers in the history of entomology if not all of biology. Although his membership in those early societies led the amicable and personable Walker to garner and keep many entomological friends for life, it was the cataloguing and prolific descriptions that was to be his professional nadir and the point of contention by many of his colleagues that much of what he had done was the source of a virtual taxonomic labyrinth that would take generations of entomologists more than a hundred years to navigate. 1 A brief biography of Walker based on this more complete one was published by Evenhuis (2011). 2 Because of the relative proclivity of the use of “catalogue” in this paper and knowing