Robert Templeton
Robert Templeton (12 December 1802 – 2 June 1892[1]) was a naturalist, artist, and entomologist, and was born at Cranmore House, Belfast, Ireland.
From Rio (1835) he took ship to Colombo, Ceylon, via the Cape of Good Hope and in this year became a Corresponding Member of the Zoological Society of London.
Recalled from Ceylon in 1852 due to the unrest in Europe which was to erupt in the bloody and terrible Crimean War, he served in the Crimea from March 1854 – 1856 and was promoted to Surgeon-Major on 7 December 1855.
Thysanurae hibernicae (Irish bristle tails and spring-tails) was published in the first volume of the Transactions of the Entomological Society of London for 1836 and is the first significant work in English on these primitive insects, remaining so until 1875.
In this short work prefaced by John Obadiah Westwood Templeton described two new genera and twelve new species accompanied by two plates showing whole animals and details of structure.
Forty years later the entomologist Lubbock paid tribute to Templeton's early work by naming a thysanuran genus after him — Templetonia.
Templeton supplied many of the insects incorporated in Westwood's book Oriental Cabinet, one of which, the beetle Compsosternus templetonii bears his name.
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.
His knowledge of the smaller mammals, birds, reptiles and fishes was instead incorporated in the work of others, notably George Robert Waterhouse and his coworker Edgar Leopold Layard who in the introduction to Notes on the Ornithology of Ceylon says "I have had the advantage of consulting with Mr. Blyth and Drs.
