George Brettingham Sowerby II

George Brettingham Sowerby II (1812 – 26 July 1884) was a British naturalist, illustrator, and conchologist. Together with his father, George Brettingham Sowerby I, he published the Thesaurus Conchyliorum and other illustrated works on molluscs. He was an elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society on 7 May 1844.^[1] He was the father of George Brettingham Sowerby III, also a malacologist.

He died on 26 July 1884 and is buried on the west side of Highgate Cemetery with his father George Brettingham Sowerby I and sister Charlotte Caroline Sowerby.^[2]

The shell craze was further hyped with the publication of British Conchology, a five volume set of books written by the lawyer John Gwyn Jeffreys (1809–1885) and which managed to combine scientific exactitude with delicate, informative historical commentary. Published between 1862 and 1869, and beautifully illustrated by the conchological artist George Sowerby (1812–1884), British Conchology would not be bettered during the Victorian era and it remains a usable and readable resource to this day.^[3]

References

^ Woodward, Bernard Barham (1898). "Sowerby, George Brettingham" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 53. London: Smith, Elder & Co. pp. 304–305.
^ Cansick, Frederick Teague (1872). The Monumental Inscriptions of Middlesex Vol 2. J Russell Smith. p. 168. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
^ Chambers, Paul (2009). British Seashells: A Guide for Collectors and Beachcombers. p. 15. ISBN 9781844680511.

H. Crosse & P. Fischer, 1885. Nécrologie. Journal de Conchyliologie 33(1): 80.
K. v. W. Palmer, 1965. Who were the Sowerbys? American Malacological Union, Annual Reports for 1964: 5–6.
J. Collins, 1973. The Sowerby family. J. S. London: Seaton & Co., 22 pp
Petit R.E. (2009) George Brettingham Sowerby, I, II & III: their conchological publications and molluscan taxa. Zootaxa 2189: 1–218.