Alexander Henry Haliday

A boyhood friend of Robert Templeton, he divided his time between Ireland and Lucca, where he co-founded the Italian Entomological Society with Camillo Rondani and Adolfo Targioni Tozzetti.

[5] His father was the nephew and heir of Dr Alexander Henry Haliday,[6] one of Belfast's best known physicians and political activists.

[7][8] The Haliday family was Protestant, though not religious, and clearly well-placed, holding 3,228 acres (13.06 km2) of farmland in County Antrim valued at £3,054.00 in 1820 (£246,763.20 in 2017).

Haliday began his education at the Belfast Academical Institution, a school that had strong leanings towards natural history.

Haliday left the Belfast Academical Institution and the family home in nearby Holywood at fifteen, moving to Dublin where he entered Trinity College in 1822.

Haliday also spent much of his time collecting insects across England, most often with Francis Walker and John Curtis[11] at the Darent river and Southgate.

[12] In 1835, he joined William Thompson on a tour of England and Wales which began in London at the British Museum and the Zoological Gardens and included visits to Matlock, the Lake District (Vale of Newlands), Crummock Water, Llangollen, and Snowdon.

From 1862 until his death, Haliday travelled across Italy collecting insects, mainly in the North (Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Lombardy, Piedmont, Aosta Valley, and Tuscany), although he made two trips to Sicily.

[5] Various trips to Switzerland, France, and Bavaria followed, and in 1865, with Edward Perceval Wright, he made an entomological expedition to Portugal.

The undamaged Hymenoptera material is laid out in numbered blocks of systematised taxa, usually disparate groups (representing species) disposed below the appropriate generic name.

The largest single source of donations to the collection was Francis Walker, the London entomologist with whom Haliday had a career-long association.

It is very likely that Haliday had printed many such works, wishing to avoid typographical and editorial errors, but these remain untraced, since anonymous and therefore uncatalogued.