Waterhouse, George Robert

George Robert Waterhouse was an English naturalist. He became interested in entomology though his father (an amateur entomologist) and he founded the Entomological Society of London along with Frederick William Hope in 1833 with himself as honorary curator. He became its president in 1849-50. The Royal Institution at Liverpool appointed him curator of its museum in 1835 and he exchanged this in 1836 for a position at the Zoological Society of London. His early work was on cataloguing the mammals at the museum and although he completed the work the next year, it was not published as he had not followed the quinary system of that time. He was invited to join Charles Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle but he declined it. On Darwin's return, the collection of mammals and beetles was entrusted to him. In November 1843 he became an assistant in the mineralogical department of the British Museum of Natural History. He became keeper in 1851 and held the position until his retirement in 1880. He was the author of A Natural History of the Mammalia (1846-48). He assisted Louis Agassiz with his Nomenclator Zoologicus.