Edward Doubleday

Edward Doubleday (1811, Epping, Essex – 1849, London) was an English entomologist mainly interested in Lepidoptera. He is best known for The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera: comprising their generic characters, a notice of their habits and transformations, and a catalogue of the species of each genus, co-written with John Obadiah Westwood, and illustrated by William Chapman Hewitson, and List of the specimens of lepidopterous insects in the collection of the British Museum.

Doubleday was also an outstanding ornithologist. In the 1830s, he joined a fellow Quaker named Robert Foster on a trip to the United States, and while here wrote a series of letters that appeared in the Entomological Magazine in London under the running title of "Communications on the Natural History of North America". He spent much time at Trenton Falls on West Canada Creek, a tributary of the Mohawk River in New York State. There, he and Foster collected numerous insects, including half a dozen stoneflies new to science that Edward Newman, yet another Quaker, described and named in a paper in the Entomological Magazine.^[1] Doubleday was appointed to the British Museum, and he stayed there until he died in December 1849. Edward never married, and he was survived by his brother Henry, who was also a bachelor and an outstanding naturalist in his own right. As Robert Mays, author of the book Henry Doubleday, The Epping Naturalist wrote: "Had Edward lived longer his name would undoubtedly have found a place beside those of the eminent 19th century entomologists".^[2]