Edgar Leopold Layard

Edgar Leopold Layard (1824–1900)

Edgar Leopold Layard (born July 23, 1824 in Florence , Italy , † January 1, 1900 in Budleigh Salterton , Devon , England ) was a British diplomat and naturalist. His research focus was ornithology.

Live and act

Layard's ancestors were Huguenots . He was the sixth son of Henry Peter John Layard, an employee of the Ceylon Civil Service , and his wife Marianne Austen. His uncle was Benjamin Austin, a London solicitor and close friend of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1820s and 1830s. His brother, Sir Austen Henry Layard, was a well-known politician and archaeologist.

From 1844 Layard spent ten years in Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka), where he explored the fauna together with Robert Templeton (1802-1892). In 1854 he went to the Cape Colony and worked under Governor George Edward Gray as a civil servant. During his spare time he was the first curator at the South African Museum , founded in 1855 , where Roland Trimen succeeded him in 1872. In the following years Layard lived in Brazil and collected birds together with Arthur Hay .

Edgar Layard, who was British Honorary Consul in Nouméa in New Caledonia , and his son Edgar Leopold Calthrop Layard (referred to in literature as either ELC Layard or Leopold Layard to distinguish him from his father) were active bird collectors. They went on expeditions to Fiji , Vanuatu , Samoa , Tonga , the Solomon Islands , New Britain and the Norfolk Island . In addition to the South African material, the bird collections that the two Layards brought together on New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands are the most scientifically significant. They sent their booty to William Sharp Macleay in Sydney , but also to many other ornithologists, so that it is widely scattered today. A large part went to the Natural History Museum at Tring and another, now kept at the World Museum Liverpool , to Henry Baker Tristram .

Front page of The Birds of South Africa

In 1887 Layard published the book The Birds of South Africa , in which he described 702 species. This work was later continued by Richard Bowdler Sharpe .

Dedication names

Daniel Giraud Elliot named the emerald dove ( Ptilinopus layardi ) from the Fiji Islands in honor of Edgard Leopold Layard in 1878 . Henry Baker Tristram named the Layard hen ( Megapodius layardi ) in 1879 and Gustav Hartlaub named the Layard warbler ( Sylvia layardi ) after Layard in 1862 . Among the mammals, the Layard palm squirrel ( Funambulus layardi ) described by Edward Blyth in 1849 and the Layard whale ( Mesoplodon layardii ) bear his name. Layard's first wife, Barbara Anne Calthrop, whom he married in 1845, is honored in the epithet of the blue- tailed parakeet ( Psittacula calthropae ).

literature

• Biography in the journal Ibis Jubilee Supplement (1908). P. 197 ( online )
• Bo Beolens and Michael Watkins (2003). Whose Bird? Common Bird Names and the People They Commemorate . Yale University Press (New Haven and London).
• Maurice Boubier (1925) Evolution of ornithology . Bookshop Felix Alcan (Paris), New scientific collection: II
• Barbara Mearns & Richard Mearns (1998). The Bird Collectors . Academic Press (London): xvii

Web links

• Illustrations from the book The Birds of South Africa