INSECTS
writer how on a Saturday evening after work—and there was no Saturday half-holiday in those days—he would walk some thirty miles to Burnt Wood in Staffordshire, sleeping in the open, collect all day Sunday and walk back on Sunday night in time for work at six o'clock on Monday morning. Most of Chappell's knowledge however perished with him, but his fine local collections were purchased at his death by Mr, C. H. Schill of Manchester, in whose private museum they remain. To coleopterists his name will be remembered in connection with those rare species Lymexelon navale and Cryptocephalus biguttatus; and to lepidopterists with the clear wing moth, Sesia culiciformis.
C. H. Gregson, a plumber of Liverpool, belonged to the same group, and was possibly the last member of it. Born in Lancaster 1817, he died in 1899 in Liverpool. His first note on entomological subjects seems to have appeared in the Annals of Natural History in 1842, on a local moth, Nyssia zonaria, and from that time to his death his notes and contributions appear constantly in the various serial publications devoted to entomology. He had some acquaintance with the Coleoptera, but was more especially a lepidopterist, and his magnificent collection of Lepidoptera, particularly rich in varieties and aberrations, was purchased in 1888 by W. Sydney Webb of Dover, in whose possession it still remains.
Belonging to a somewhat different rank in life were Noah Greening of Warrington, the brothers Cooke of Liverpool, and Hodgkinson of Preston.
Noah Greening was born in 1821 and died in 1879. He is best known to the general public as an eminently successful business man and the founder of the Warrington firm of wire drawers which bears his name. But he was also an ardent student of nature, an ornithologist and geologist of considerable attainments, but more especially a lepidopterist. He left little in writing, but the assistance he rendered Newman is obvious to all readers of that author's British Butterflies and Moths, for years the standard work on our Lepidoptera. Greening introduced several species of moths to the British list, and formed a very complete and extensive collection of British Lepidoptera, the greater part of which is now in the Liverpool Museum combined with that of Nathaniel Cooke.
The brothers Cooke, Nathaniel above mentioned and Benjamin, born respectively in 1818 and 1817, were leading entomologists in south Lancashire during the second quarter of last century. They were both engaged in mercantile pursuits, devoting all their leisure to their favourite study. Nathaniel was almost exclusively a lepidopterist, and to him we owe the discovery of Nyssia zonaria as a British insect (1838).
He died in Liverpool 1885. His brother Benjamin was perhaps the better all round entomologist. He studied nearly all the orders, and the few records which exist of the Hemiptera, Diptera, etc., of south Lancashire are almost entirely his work. He died in Southport in 1883. Notes and articles by both brothers are to be found in all the magazines devoted to natural history quite up to the time of their deaths.
103
