John Hellins (entomologist)

After around twelve years his health declined, including a near loss of his sight, and in 1879 the Church allowed him to retire (with one good eye) to a sinecure as a "clergyman without care of souls" with lodgings in the precinct of Exeter Cathedral, where his wife ran a day school, assisted by their two daughters and quite possibly by him.

During an egg-exchange in 1858 while he was still teaching, Hellins struck up a correspondence with William Buckler (1814–1884), a graphic and portrait artist who, steadily losing his employment to photography, had started a project to depict the hitherto largely unknown caterpillars of the British moths and butterflies.

[7] Over the years they then built up such a large portfolio of descriptions and paintings, that they agreed to collaborate on a fully illustrated book on British caterpillars (along with eggs and pupae).

Perhaps a natural and priestly modesty moved him to decline co-authorship, or perhaps an overwhelming urge to give of himself in memory of his recently deceased friend, whom he was not long to survive.

It is notable however that he was, with Buckler, the joint dedicatee of a popular book on Lepidoptera by Stainton,[9] and that his descriptions of caterpillars continued to be attributed to him up to the middle of the twentieth century.

[10] Hellins exchanged letters with Charles Darwin on the question of the sex ratio in moths;[11][12] and kept a continuous entomological diary from 1857 to his death in 1887 (whereabouts currently unknown).