- Source: Adam White (zoologist)
Adam White (29 April 1817 – 30 December 1878) was a Scottish zoologist.
Biography
White was born in Edinburgh on 29 April 1817. He became acquainted with John Edward Gray, Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum. At the age of eighteen, White obtained a post in the Museum in the Zoology Department. In 1841 he was given the task of identifying and publishing the spiders collected by Charles Darwin on the Voyage of the Beagle and "preserved in spirits of wine, as spiders should always be if possible". This work was published as Description of new or little known Arachnida.
White specialised in insects and crustaceans, writing the List of the Specimens of Crustacea in the British Museum (1847) and A Popular History of Mammalia (1850). White was a member of the Entomological Society of London from 1839 to 1863, and a Fellow of the Linnean Society from 1846 to 1855.
White suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of his first wife in 1861. He remarried in 1862, and had at least three children by his second wife. He died intestate in Pollokshields on 30 December 1878.
Species named in White's honour
John Obadiah Westwood named the insect species Taphroderes whitii in White's honour, after White pointed a specimen of that same insect out to Westwood during a visit to the British Museum.
Selected works
References
Further reading
Clark Paul F., Presswell Bronwen (2001). "Adam White: The Crustacean Years" (PDF). The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. 49 (1): 149–166. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 August 2014.
Stevenson O.J. (1907). "The Eccentricities of Genius". The Canadian Magazine. 29 (1): 3–9.
External links
Works by Adam White at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Adam White at the Internet Archive
Works by Adam White at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Testimonials of Adam White