Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe
Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe ( born September 1, 1813 in Penzance, Cornwall, † June 20 1893 in Brighton, East Sussex ) was an English entomologist. His research focus was the order of the beetles ( Coleoptera).
Life and work
After his medical training at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and his qualification for Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons ( MRCS ) in 1835 was a medical assistant in the Royal Navy and served in Australia, the West Indies and in the Mediterranean. In 1843 he retired from the naval service. He married and settled near St Austell in Cornwall, where kaolinite was produced on the estate of his wife. When his wife died in 1851, he moved to London and turned to natural history studies. In the following years he undertook Sammelexpedtionen to Europe, North Africa and the lower reaches of the Amazon. His main focus, however, he laid on the description of the scientific collections of Alfred Russel Wallace, Robert Templeton and other researchers whose approximately 2,500 type specimens are kept in the Natural History Museum in London. Pascoe's first scientific paper in 1850 was about the Cornish flora, however, he devoted all his further work of entomology, especially beetles. Many of Pascoe's original descriptions and scientific studies have been published in publications of the Linnean and Entomological Societies. His monographs on the Malaysian and Australian longhorn beetle from the collections of Alfred Russel Wallace are among the most standard works on this beetle family.
1852 Pascoe was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society. In 1854 he became a Fellow of the Entomological Society, and from 1864 to 1865 he was president of that company. He was also a member of the Société entomologique de France, the Botanical Society of London and was part of the governing body of the Ray Society.
Although Pascoe believed in evolution, he criticized in his works, Darwin's theory of evolution.