Article Title
George Starkey, An Early Seventeenth-Century American Entomologist
Abstract
(excerpt) Between the earliest known North American entomological observations made by John White (Wilkinson, 1973a) and Thomas Hariot, and the beginning of more systematic investigations by John Banister (Ewan and Ewan, 1970) and other collectors in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially those promoted by the London apothecary and naturalist James Petiver (Stearns, 1952; Wilkinson, 1966), a number of persons wrote about insects observed in British America. However, their remarks were usually very brief, and confined to notices of one or two species. Only a few seventeenth-century investigators actually studied North American insects and related forms in situ with any diligence. The earliest of these appears to have been George Starkey (1627 or 1628-1665).