Name James Petiver | Education Rugby School | |
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Died April 20, 1718, London, United Kingdom | ||
Day Meeting | Remembering James Petiver (1665 – 1718)
James Petiver (c.1665–1718) was a London apothecary, a Fellow of the Royal Society as well as London's informal Temple Coffee House Botany Club, famous for his study of botany and entomology.
Contents
Petiver the Natural Historian
Life
Born in Hillmorton, Warwickshire where his father was a haberdasher, he studied at Rugby Free School and became an apprentice to an apothecary in London, supplying medicine to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He is buried at St. Botolph Church.
Scientific work
Petiver visited the Netherlands in 1711 to study with Dutch entomologists. He recorded many English folk-names for butterflies, also coining some himself, and wrote some of the first butterfly books that used English names in addition to Latin. He himself was not very proficient in Latin although he was a member of several scholarly societies and an educated gentleman.
He named the White Admiral butterfly, and gave the name Fritillary to another group of butterflies after the Latin word for a chequered dice box. He called skippers "hogs", swallowtails "Royal Williams", walls as "Enfield Eyes" and marbled whites as "Half-Mourners".
Petiver received many specimens, seeds and much other material from correspondents in the American and British colonies, including Samuel Browne in Madras. After his death, his collections were purchased by Sir Hans Sloane for £4000, and some of it is now in the Natural History Museum in London.