George Henry Verrall

George Henry Verrall (born February 7, 1848 in Lewes , † September 16, 1911 in Newmarket ) was a British entomologist , botanist , conservationist and politician. He was the UK's leading specialist in flying.

Life

Verrall came from a traditional family of auctioneers, attended Lews Grammar School and became the assistant to his brother John Frederick Verrall, who was a high official in horse races in England (he ran the Lewes race and was a partner in a betting company). When his brother died in 1877, he succeeded him and moved to Newmarket, the center of British equestrianism.

He was a hobby entomologist and since 1866 a member of the Entomological Society of London, of which he was president from 1899 to 1900. Verrall was a specialist in two-winged birds and bought large collections to complete his own ( Ferdinand Kowarz (1838–1914), with many specimens from Hermann Loew , Jacques-Marie-Frangile Bigot , with specimens from Justin Pierre Marie Macquart (1778–1855)). As an entomologist, he worked closely with his nephew James Edward Collin (1876–1969), and both of them first described around 550 species. Her collection (the most important in her field in England, ahead of that of the Natural History Museum) is in the Hope Collection at Oxford University, to which she was donated in 1967.

As a conservationist, he bought marshland in Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire to preserve natural flora and fauna (including over 4,000 species of insects that Charles Darwin collected here as early as the 1820s). It was near Newmarket and was threatened at the end of the 19th century, as traditional cultivation (thatch, peat) died out and the drainage for agricultural use threatened. In 1899, the National Trust bought parts of Wicken Fen (which became Britain's first nature reserve) with funds from Charles Rothschild , and several private individuals followed. In 2011 it comprised over 1,600 acres of nature reserve (partly named after Verrill). Verrill also discovered plant species in Wicken Fen that were considered extinct in Great Britain.

He was politically a member of the Tories and for them briefly in 1910 in Parliament for Newmarket.

His brother John Hubert Verrill published the annual List of Horses in Training in England .

Fonts

• Platypezidae, Pipunculidae and Syrphidae of Great Britain, British flies, 1901
• Stratiomyidae and succeeding families of the Diptera Brachycera of Great Britain, British flies, Volume 5, 1909, London: Gurney and Jackson, Biodiversity Library (with drawings by Collin)

Web links

• Colin Salter, George Henry Verrall (1848–1911) and the fen full of flies, 2011