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lepidopterist who lived in south-west Essex was Arthur
Thurnall of Wanstead. He was the national authority
on the Tortricidae and wrote an important paper entitled
"List of Tortrices taken in south Essex between 1885
and 1901" which appeared in parts in The Entomologist
for 1902. Both Meldola and Thurnall bequeathed their
collections to the Essex Field Club and they are now
housed in the Passmore Edwards Museum.
Another part of Essex which has attracted distinguished
lepidopterists is the south-east. It was put on the
map in 1845 when Samuel Stevens, Secretary of The
Entomological Society of London (now The Royal Ento-
mological Society), added four species to the British
list during a one-day visit to Southend. Howard
Vaughan regularly used to spend his holidays at Leigh-
on-Sea where he discovered and named a species new to
science in 1870. Later he wrote a list entitled "Notes
on the Lepidoptera of Leigh, Essex and its neighbour-
hood" which was printed in the Essex Naturalist for 1889.
Vaughan was succeeded in the south-east by Frank Whittle,
one of the really great figures of Essex entomology
because no one else left a richer legacy of records
and information. His main list, entitled "Lepidoptera
in south-east Essex", appeared in 1899 in a now defunct
journal called Science Gossip.
One of Whittle's friends was the Ref. C. R. N. Burrows,
who was curate at Wanstead and vicar of Rainham, Brent-
wood and Mucking successively. He wrote short lists
for Rainham and Mucking, but his main contribution to
Essex entomology was written by someone else! Burrows
co-operated with F. N. Pierce in the important standard
work The genitalia of the Geometridae and the latter
was a frequent visitor to Mucking. Pierce was horrified
to find that Burrows was incapable of identifying the
many interesting species of Microlepidoptera which
occurred in his garden. So he persuaded Burrows to make
a collection and send it to him for determination.
Based on this, Pierce wrote a paper called "Lepidoptera
of an Essex garden" which appeared in The Entomologist
for 1918; this contained a species new to the British