Robert Templeton - Work On Sri Lankan Arthropods

Work On Sri Lankan Arthropods

In Ceylon Templeton worked mainly on Lepidoptera, Coleoptera and Hymenoptera alongside Edgar Leopold Layard (1824–1900). New species of Lepidoptera collected by Templeton and Layard were described by Frederic Moore, Francis Walker and George Robert Gray. The new Coleoptera were described by Joseph Sugar Baly, Francis Walker, John Obadiah Westwood, Carl August Dohrn and Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe. Templeton's publications on Lepidoptera amount to some general comments on papilionid butterflies and two species descriptions — Oiketicus terlius and Oiketicus (Cryptothelia) consortus. The bulk of the new beetles, some of the Hymenoptera (the rest were described by Frederick Smith) and other insects in Templeton's collection were described by Francis Walker who also compiled the first list of the insects of Ceylon for Tennent's book Ceylon, Physical, Historical and Topographical based on the collections of Templeton, Layard, the British Museum and the Museum of the East India Company; there are 2,000 species and Layard and Templeton captured between them 932 species of butterflies and moths in Ceylon many, new to science. Templeton supplied many of the insects incorporated in Westwood's book Oriental Cabinet, one of which, the beetle Compsosternus templetonii bears his name. Unfortunately only the published part of Templeton's correspondence with Westwood (the Secretary of the Entomological Society) survived, the manuscripts are apparently lost. Templeton's Ceylon insect collection was apparently divided between the Belfast Museum (now in the National Museum of Ireland), the Entomological Society of London and the British Museum (the Entomological Society's collections are now incorporated in those of the latter institution). Templeton's watercolour paintings of Ceylon butterflies are in the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Templeton, Layard and George Henry Kendrick Thwaites and later John Nietner (died 1874) contributed almost all that was known of the insect fauna of the island at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century including a privately printed list of Thysanura, Myriapoda, Scorpionidea, Cheliferidae and Phrynidae (now Amblypygi) from Ceylon which is not traced, and remarked on the habits of the large poisonous centipedes Scolopendra pallipes and S. crassa in two (published) communications to Westwood. Many of his manuscripts were lost when the clipper Memnon sank in 1851.