Robert Cyril Layton Perkins, 1866 - 1955

Abstract

Robert Cyril Layton Perkins , born on 15 November 1866, died on 29 September 1955, aged 88. A zoologist, principally an entomologist, an outstanding field-worker and taxonomist, his name is inseparably connected with the investigation of the fauna of the Hawaiian islands, besides intensive studies of certain groups of British insects. Early upbringing and school-days His love of nature and ardent interest in insects, together with exceptional powers of observation and memory, manifested themselves from the earliest time which he could recall. Yet he had no scientific training whatever at school, nor until he was half-way through his undergraduate years at Oxford. From his family background several persons stand out, of a type far rarer now (if, indeed, it has not almost vanished); men, largely clergy, who, living in the country for years in the same place, gained an intimate knowledge of the natural history or antiquities of their own districts. His grandfather, the Rev. Benjamin Robert Perkins, B.C.L., of Lincoln College and Christchurch, Oxford, after working in Buckinghamshire as a parish priest and schoolmaster, was Vicar of Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, for over 50 years (1829-81). A good classical scholar, he was interested in geology, archaeology and architecture. Perkins’s maternal grandfather was also a clergyman. For his mother was Agnes M artha Beach, daughter of the Rev. Percy Thomas, Rector of Nash, near Pembroke. Her relatives were not, as far as he knew, interested in science.