John Jenner Weir

John Jenner Weir, FLS, FZS (9 August 1822 – 23 March 1894) was an English amateur entomologist, ornithologist and British civil servant.

He is best known today for being one of the naturalists who corresponded with and provided important data to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.

He played an important role in the formulation of Wallace's theory of aposematism, providing the first experimental evidence for the effectiveness, and hence the existence, of warning coloration in caterpillars.

[1] In the 1867 letter to Charles Darwin in which he proposed his hypothesis of warning coloration in animals, Alfred Russel Wallace credited Weir with providing him with the key observation that birds in his aviary would not capture and eat a certain kind of common white moth.

[5]He died from heart failure on 23 March 1894, just a couple of weeks after participating in his last meeting of the South London Entomological and Natural History Society where he submitted his final paper for publication.