Charles Walter De Vis

Charles Walter De Vis

Charles Walter De Vis (until 1882 Devis , born May 9, 1829 in Birmingham , Warwickshire , England, † April 30, 1915 in Toowong , Brisbane , Queensland, Australia) was a British-Australian clergyman, zoologist and museum director. His main research interests were herpetology , palaeontology and ornithology .

Life

De Vis was born in Birmingham to James and Maria Devis (née Chambers). The family was related to portrait painters of the same name. After graduating from the Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham, De Vis studied at Magdalene College , Cambridge, where he graduated in 1851 with a Bachelor of Arts and in 1884 with a Master of Arts. In 1851 he became a deacon and in 1853 rector of St. John's in Brecon , Wales. However, his great interest in natural history led to his becoming a curator at the Queen's Park Museum in Manchester shortly after 1862 . Here he wrote his first scientific article and became a member of the Anthropological Society.

In June 1870 De Vis emigrated to Queensland, Australia. He first settled at Black Gin Creek near Rockhampton and then at Clermont. After a visit to England he became a librarian at the Rockhampton School of Arts. From 1880 to 1882 he wrote under the pseudonym "Thickthorn" 18 geological and ornithological articles in the journal Queenslander . The quality of these articles led the Queensland Museum Trustees to hire De Vis as curator. He began his work in February 1882 and was appointed director in 1901. He held this post until his retirement in 1905. Until 1912 he acted as a consultant for the museum.

De Vis specialized primarily in the areas of paleontology and systematic vertebrate zoology. Despite limited financial resources and a small staff, he contributed significantly to the expansion of the museum collection. He also set up a reference library and oversaw the museum's move from the public library to the exhibition building in Bowen Park. In 1891 De Vis founded the museum journal The Annals of the Queensland Museum , in which William MacGregor wrote articles about New Guinea, among others .

De Vis described 551 extant and fossil taxa, including the Skinkart Concinnia queenslandiae that Gleitbeutlerart Petaurus gracilis , the Spiegeldickichtschnäpper , the Great Pittadrossel , the long-tailed tracked catcher , the Bergwaldschnäpper , the brown back stubborn , the Blaukappenflöter , the Papua Dornschnabel , the Prachtkleiber , the Hardwood Honigfresser , the Papua Pieper , the Papuasericornis that mountain Firetail , the stained warts Honigfresser , the mountain Dornschnabel , Mallomys aroaensis , the Bennett-tree kangaroo , Dobsonia pannietensis , Carlia munda and Cyrtodactylus louisiadensis .

In the 50 years after 1865 De Vis published around 130 scientific articles in various journals, including The Zoologist , the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology , the Memoirs of the Anthropological Society of London , the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland , the Annals of the Queensland Museum, and the Annual Reports of the Administrator of HM Government in New Guinea .

De Vis was a member of various organizations, including the Royal Society of Queensland , the British and Australian Ornithologists' Unions , the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia. From 1888 to 1889 he was President of the Royal Society of Queensland and in 1901 he was elected first Vice-President of the Australian Ornithologists' Union. In 1886 and 1888 he directed exhibitions in London and Melbourne. In the last years of his life he worked on a comparative vocabulary of the Aboriginal languages. De Vis was married twice. His first wife died in Wellington, New Zealand in 1897. On September 9, 1898, he married the widow Katherine Elizabeth Luckle, née Coulsen. He died on April 30, 1915 in Enoggera, a northern suburb of Brisbane, and was buried on the section of the Church of England in Toowong Cemetery.

Dedication names

In 1920 the two Australian herpetologists Edgar Waite and Hebar Longman named the snake species Denisonia devisi after De Vis. In 1987 the fossil koala species Madakoala devisi was named after him.

literature

• Kraig Adler: Contributions to the History of Herpetology. Volume 2. Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, 2007, ISBN 978-0-916984-71-7 . Pp. 107-108.

Web links

• de Vis, Charles Walter (1829-1915) - Australian Dictionary of Biography
• De Vis Charles Walter (1829-1915) - Encyclopedia of Australian science