butterfly
Accession Number NWHCM : 1940.174.
Description
The world-wide Fountaine-Neimy Collection of butterflies, collected by Margaret Fountaine and Khalil Neimy from about 1890 to 1940. The collection is remarkable for the number of reared specimens, and the high quality of the material. It contains a few types. The collection is housed in nine 30-drawer mahogany cabinets made by Hill and Sons. There are four sketchbooks in the Natural History Museum Entomology Library which contain paintings of many of the caterpillars from which the specimens were reared, and there is a 10-volume journal of MEF's life from 1878 to 1939 in the Norwich Museum archives. Cataloguing of the specimens was started in 2005.
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This is just one drawer from a collection resulting from a lifetime's assembling by Margaret Fountaine and her companion, Khalil Neimy. She travelled all over the world from 1892 to 1940, breeding and collecting specimens. The collection contains 22,000 butterflies, most of which were bred from eggs or caterpillars, and are therefore in exceptionally fine condition. In addition to the collection, Fountaine bequeathed a sealed box to Norwich Castle which was to remain unopened until 1978. When it was opened, it was found to contain twelve journals detailing her life from 1878, when she was fifteen, until she died in 1940. Extracts from the journals have been published, generating considerable interest in both them and the collection. The combination of a scientifically important collection and sociologically significant literature is not unique, but there are few naturalists, let alone Victorian women naturalists, who have collected in, and written about, sixty countries on six continents over a span of fifty years.
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