David Sharp (entomologist)

English physician and entomologist (1840 1922)

David Sharp (18 October 1840 – 27 August 1922) was an English physician and entomologist who worked mainly on Coleoptera. He was among the most prolific publishers in the history of entomology with more than 250 papers that included seven major revisions and reviews and a highly influential work on the structure and modifications of the male genital structures among the beetle families. He was the editor of the Zoological Record for three decades.

David Sharp was born at Towcester and lived his early years in Stony Stratford. Some twelve years later his parents removed to London, where he received most of his education. After attending one or two preparatory schools, in 1853 he entered St. John's Foundation School which was then at Kilburn. At the age of seventeen he commenced to help his father, a leather merchant, and about the same time he began collecting beetles, some of his favourite haunts being Ken Wood and Hammersmith Marshes, as well as the sandy shores about Deal and Dover. Lacking an interest in business life, he choose to pursue a career in medicine. He accordingly, after studying for two years at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, went to the University of Edinburgh, where he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Medicine in 1866. After graduation he assisted a friend with his practice in London for a year or two. He had at first some thought of seeking an appointment in connection with entomology at the British Museum, but abandoned the idea; and about ten years later he went so far as to apply for the post of Curator of the City of Glasgow Industrial Museum, being recommended by H. W. Bates and Frederick Smith amongst others. However, after his short residence in London he was offered a post as medical officer in the Crichton Asylum at Dumfries, which led to his taking charge of a case at Thornhill in the neighbourhood, where he joined the Dumfriesshire and Galloway Scientific, Natural History, and Antiquarian Society upon its reconstruction in 1876. This engagement gave him the leisure he desired for prosecuting the studies on which his heart was set, and it was during this period that he published some of his earlier papers. It was also here that his marriage took place. In 1883, upon the death of a wealthy patient, William Cunninghame Graham Bontine (1825 1883), to whom he served as a special medical attendant, he returned to England. Bontine had been injured on the head by an Irishman during the Irish famine. The injury led to serious mental issues and the patient was declared "insane" and admitted to the Crichton Royal Institution. Sharp initially went to live at Southampton, but, finding it too far from London, after about two years he removed to Dartford. In 1885 he was invited to go to Cambridge as Curator of the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology. There he spent the next nineteen years of his life, till in 1909, when he retired to Brockenhurst, where he had built a residence, Lawnside, on the very edge of the New Forest, facing the extensive heath of Black Knowl where he resided till his death on 27 August 1922. Being connected with the Entomologist's Monthly Magazine and the Entomologist, in either an editorial or a reference capacity, many of his numerous shorter papers appear in these magazines. Yet others, as well as some of his more pretentious papers, will be found in the transactions of societies with which he was connected. Perhaps his earliest contribution to entomological literature was a paper on the British species of Agathidium (Coleoptera) read before the Entomological Society of London on 6 November 1865. An interesting discussion on heredity and kindred subjects between Sharp and Wallace, arising in connection with Westwood's introduction of the subject of "mimicry" at the Entomological Society of London in November 1866, was reported in the Athenaeum of 1, 8, and 15 December 1866, and gives Sharp's views at the time on this subject. A Revision of the British Species of Homalota (Coleoptera) was published by the Entomological Society of London soon after his graduation at Edinburgh. In November 1873 appeared a paper in Spanish – Especies nuevas de Coleópteros por Don David Sharp. This refers to insects collected by his friend G. R. Crotch, whose obituary notice Sharp contributed to volume 11 of the Entomologists' Monthly Magazine. The Object and Method of Zoological Nomenclature appeared in November 1873. This is an important and well thought out paper on a debatable subject, the argument of which is perhaps summed up in the sentence, "Nomina si nescis, perit et cognitio rerum," which appears on the cover. A short paper on the Coleoptera of the Scotch Fir came out in the Scottish Naturalist about this time. The Dascillidae of New Zealand was published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History in July 1878; while work on the water beetles was taken in hand for publication by the Royal Society of Dublin. Sharp and Fowler's Catalogue of the British Coleoptera appeared in 1893; the Rhynchophorous Coleoptera of Japan in 1896; the articles Insecta and Termites in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1902; and an article on the Orders of Insects, a subject in which Sharp was much interested, in the Entomologist for 1909. The Distribution of Plants and Animals on the Globe (a paper read before the Dumfries Nat. Hist. Society in 1883); Stridulation in Ants, 1893; an Account of the Phasmidae, 1898; and the Grouse fly, 1907, are away from his special order – Coleoptera; while A Scheme for a National System of Rest Funds (or Pensions) for Working People (1892) shows that Sharp could detach himself from entomology when he wished to do so. Sharp's major papers included those on the Coleoptera of the Hawaiian Islands published by the Entomological Society of London in 1878, 1879 and 1880. These were followed in 1899 and 1908 by the Fauna Hawaiiensis brought out by the Royal Society. This was followed by his work on the Beetles of Central America, prepared chiefly from material collected by Frederick DuCane Godman and Osbert Salvin, and published in 1894 and later years in that monumental work known as the "Fauna Centrali Americana". In 1895 appeared the first volume of the Insecta in the Cambridge Natural History, this being followed by the second volume in 1899. Of their influence on the advancement of entomology, and especially of our knowledge of insects as living things, too much cannot be said. The publication was so popular that it prevented him for producing a new edition incorporating improvements in the classification of the insects. He published on the topic in the Entomologist. In 1910 the Insecta was translated into Russian by N. Y. Kuznetsov. In 1912 the Entomological Society of London, with the assistance of the Royal Society, brought out as Part III of the Transactions The Comparative Anatomy of the Male Genital Tube in Coleoptera by Sharp & Muir, an exhaustive treatise of 166 pages, and 37 plates. All the beetle families were examined, and the results of numerous dissections are included in this highly influential work on the beetle families.

1869 A revision of the British species of Homalota. Transactions of the Entomological Society of London, 1869(2–3), 91–272. 1874 The Staphylinidae of Japan. Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 1874: 1–103. See also 1888
1876 Contributions to an insect fauna of the Amazon Valley. Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 1876: 27–424. 1880–1882 Monograph on Aquatic Carnivorous Coleoptera or Dytiscidae Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society 2: 1–800. 1888 The Staphylinidae of Japan. The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, (6)2,. 277–477. 1876
1882– 1886 (1882–1886) Staphylinidae. pp. 145–824. In: 1882–1887. Biologia Centrali Americana. Insecta. Coleoptera. 1(2). London: Taylor & Francis, xvi+824 pp., 19 plates. 1887 Pselaphidae. pp. 1–46. In: 1887–1905. Biologia Centrali Americana. Insecta. Coleoptera. 2(1). London: Taylor & Francis, xii+717 pp., 19 plates. 1891 Synteliidae. In: Biologia Centrali Americana. Coleoptera, Insecta. Coleoptera. 2(1). London: Taylor & Francis. 438–440. 1896 – 1913 With Robert Cyril Layton Perkins and Alfred Newton Fauna Hawaiiensis. 1899 Some points in the classification of the Insecta Hexapoda, Proc. 4th Int. Congr. Zool., pp. 246–249
1912 with Frederick Arthur Godfrey Muir. The comparative anatomy of the male genital tube in Coleoptera. Transactions of the Entomological Society of London. III: 477 462, 36pls. p. 523, pl. 60, figs. 107–109, male genitalia. Sharp also contributed to two catalogues of British Coleoptera (with Oliver Erichson Janson, in 1871, and with William Weekes Fowler, in 1893).