William Aitcheson Haswell FRS (5 August 1854 – 24 January 1925) was a Scottish-Australian zoologist specialising in crustaceans, winner of the 1915 Clarke Medal.
[citation needed] Amongst his teachers were Thomas Henry Huxley, Archibald Geikie and Charles Wyville Thomson.
[2] Haswell arrived in Sydney in late 1878 and soon began work in a small marine zoological laboratory at Watsons Bay.
Haswell was elected a member of the Linnean Society of New South Wales in April 1879, when he had already contributed five papers to the Proceedings.
He was much interested in the fauna of the New South Wales coast, and especially in the Crustacea, Annelida and Bryozoa, but also did other work covering a wide field.
In January 1898 appeared Haswell's best known publication A Text Book of Zoology (London) written in conjunction with Thomas Jeffery Parker of the University of Otago, New Zealand.
On vacation he was fond of fly-fishing and golf, but generally he was an unceasing worker, collecting himself the materials for his researches, and making his own drawings.
Many generations of students in Great Britain, America and Australia, laid the foundations of their knowledge of zoology on this book.
Haswell was himself a good and sound teacher, and at the time of his death, in four out of the six universities of Australia, the chair of zoology or biology was held by one of his former students.