Edward Meyrick, F.R.S.

Abstract

MR. EDWARD MEYRICK will reach the age of eighty-two years on November 24, and his many friends and correspondents all over the world will join with NATURE in good wishes and congratulations on his effective life's work. In 1927, when awarded the Captain Scott Memorial Medal by the South African Biological Society, for his study of South African Microlepidoptera, the president justly remarked that “Mr. Meyrick's is an example of what can be done by a single individual, unsupported, with no financial backing, but devoted to a task that fills his life”. Meyrick is a Wiltshireman, still residing at Thornhanger, Marlborough. He was a boy at Marlborough College from 1868 until 1873, and a classical scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. From 1877 until 1886 he was a schoolmaster at Sydney, Australia, and at Christchurch in New Zealand. He returned to Marlborough College as an assistant master in 1887 and continued there until his retirement in 1914. During the last fifteen years of that period, he was president of the Marlborough College Natural History Society, which has been an inspiration to so many young naturalists, many of them now men of distinction. Marlborough is indeed one of the most fortunate of schools, situated in the beautiful valley of the Kennet between Savernake Forest and the wide and open chalk downs of Wiltshire, with its varied fauna and flora. The country-side is famous for dykes, barrows and hill-forts, and the county contains Stonehenge, Avebury, Old Sarum and Silbury; while the British ‘mount’ of Marlborough stands within the historic grounds of the College, once a British fort, once a castle, once a mansion, once the “Castle Inn” with its memories of Pitt, now a school, and always famous.