J. H. Emerton

James Henry Emerton (March 31, 1847 – December 5, 1931) was an American arachnologist and illustrator.

Early life

Emerton was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on March 31, 1847. He was rather frail, and a young helper in his father's drug store, George F. Markoe, interested the boy in outdoor life. They collected plants, insects and shore invertebrates and at the age of fifteen he was frequently visiting the Essex Institute, where he became acquainted with A. S. Packard, F. W. Putnam, John Robinson, Caleb Cooke, and others who later became more or less prominent students of natural history.

From the first, he showed much skill in drawing and made sketches of a great variety of natural objects. Of these early drawings, there are many in Packard's Guide and forty quarto plates in Watson and Eaton Botany of the Fortieth Parallel published in 1871.

Professional life

He was elected to the Boston Society of Natural History in 1870, and in 1873-1874 was an assistant in the Museum. While there, he prepared the notes to Hentz's Spiders of the United States and the article on cave spiders of Indiana and Kentucky (1875).

He had already decided to study spiders, had collected in over 100 localities in the New England states, and had amassed a collection of more than 300 species. Early in 1875 he left the Boston Society to spend more than a year in Europe. While there he was enrolled as a student for a short time at the University of Leipzig (October 1875 to April 1876) and later (May to July 1876) at the University of Jena, but apparently he spent much time collecting spiders and becoming acquainted with the arachnologists of Europe, particularly O. P. Cambridge, Simon, Koch, Thorell and Ohlert. He had taken to Europe his collection of New England spiders and from Leipzig in December 1875, wrote an article comparing them with those of the European fauna.