George Bowdler Buckton

George Bowdler Buckton (24 May 1818, London – 25 September 1905, Haslemere, Surrey) was an English chemist and entomologist who specialised in aphids.

Early Life

Buckton was born in London and lived in Hornsey, England, the eldest son of George Buckton (1785 - 1847; Proctor to the Prerogative Court of Canterbury) and Eliza Buckton (née Merricks, 1786 - 1842). At the age of five he had an accident which left him partially paralysed for the rest of his long life; this precluded attendance at school so he was privately educated. He became however a scholar of classics and was an accomplished musician and painter. After his father's death he moved to Queen's Road, West London, and In 1848 he became an assistant to August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818-1892) at the nearby Royal College of Chemistry in London.^{[1], [2], [3]} In 1867 he married Mary Ann Odling (1831 – 1927), the sister of William Odling with whom he had written his last chemical paper. He designed his house at Haslemere and built an observatory there.

Research in Chemistry

His first paper, on reactions of cyanogen with platinum ammine complexes, appeared in 1852.^[5] He wrote two papers with Hofmann on reactions of sulfuric acid with amides and nitriles. ^[6] He also publIshed much work on alkyls of main-group elements, e. g. on the discovery of the anti-knock agent tetra-ethyl lead. ^[7]; His last paper on chemistry, on aluminium trimethyl and triethyl, appeared in 1865 c-authored with William Odling. ^[8] Much of his research on alkyls has been reviewed by modern authors.^{[9], [10]} appeared wrote scientific papers on chemistry until 1865 when he moved to Haslemere and started to study Hemiptera. In 1867, ^[7] he was elected a member of the Royal Society. He wrote:

• Monograph of the British Aphides (four volumes, London, 1876-1883).
• Monograph of the British Cicadæ or Tettigidae (two volumes, Macmillan & Co., London, 1890-1891).
• The Natural History of Eristalis tenax or the Drone-Fly (Macmillan & Co., London, 1895).
• A Monograph of the Membracidae, with an article by Edward Bagnall Poulton (1856-1943) (Lovell Reeve & Co., London, 1901-1903).

Personality

Of him, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote that Buckton had " Truly a devoted, spiritual, knightly nature, with a faith as clear as the height of the pure blue heaven."