Thomas Vernon Wollaston

Thomas Vernon Wollaston (born March 9, 1822 in Scotter , Lincolnshire, † January 4, 1878 in Teignmouth , Devon) was an English entomologist and malacologist .

Live and act

Wollaston came from a wealthy family. He attended the Grammar School in Bury St. Edmunds and studied from 1842 at Jesus College in Cambridge, where he obtained a BA in 1845 and an MA in 1849. In 1847 he was accepted into the Linnean Society of London . When symptoms of a lung disease became noticeable, he stayed in Madeira to relax in 1847/48 . After his return he looked in various places in England to find a climate favorable to his illness and finally settled in Teignmouth. By 1855 he spent four more winters in Madeira; In 1858 he toured the Canary Islands with Richard Thomas Lowe and John Gray and visited them again the following year with Lowe. In 1866 he was with Gray on the Cape Verde Islands . During all these stays, despite his illness, he devoted himself with considerable perseverance and tenacity to the study of the animal world, in particular the beetles and other insect orders as well as the molluscs. In numerous publications he described hundreds of new species. He took the view that the Atlantic archipelagos ( Macaronesia ) had a connection to the mainland in earlier geological ages. He was a close friend of Charles Darwin , even if he could not bring himself to accept the theory of evolution because of his religious convictions. In 1855 the British Museum (now the Natural History Museum ) acquired its collection of Madden Beetles.

In 1869 Wollaston married the youngest daughter of his friend Shepherd from Teignmouth. The marriage remained childless. From 1875 to 1876 he spent half a year on St. Helena with his wife and John Gray. There he probably overexerted himself on his collective excursions, which initially went unnoticed due to the mild climate, but led to a collapse on the stormy journey home in bad weather, from which he could no longer recover. Another stay in Madeira was ineffective. Wollaston died in January 1878.

Works

• Insecta Maderensia , 1854
• On the Variation of Species, with Especial Reference to the Insecta 1856
• Coleoptera Atlantidum , 1865
• Testacea Atlantica, or the land and freshwater shells of the Azores, Madeira, Salvages, Canaries, Cape Verdes, and Saint Helena. , 1878.

Wollaston also wrote a variety of short and long papers on North Atlantic beetles .