William Elford Leach (2 February 1790 – 25 August 1836) was an English zoologist and marine biologist.
Life and work
Elford Leach was born at Hoe Gate, Plymouth, the son of an attorney, George Leach (1748–1823), a naturalist, and his wife Jenny Elford. At the age of twelve he began a medical apprenticeship at the Devonshire and Exeter Hospital, studying anatomy and chemistry. By this time he was already collecting marine animals from Plymouth Sound and along the Devon coast. At seventeen he began studying medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, finishing his training at the University of Edinburgh before graduating MD from the University of St Andrews (where he had never studied). From 1813 Leach concentrated on his zoological interests and was employed as an 'Assistant Librarian' (what would later be called Assistant Keeper) in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, where he had responsibility for the zoological collections. Here he threw himself into the task of reorganising and modernising these collections, many of which had been neglected since Hans Sloane left them to the nation. In 1815, he published the first bibliography of entomology in Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopedia (see Timeline of entomology – 1800–1850). He also worked and published on other invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds. and was the naturalist who separated the centipedes and millipedes from the insects, giving them their own group, the Myriapoda. In his day he was the world's leading expert on the Crustacea and was in contact with scientists in the United States and throughout Europe. In 1816 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25.
Death In 1821, he suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork and became unable to continue his researches. He resigned from the British Museum in March 1822 and his elder sister Jane took him to continental Europe to convalesce. They lived in Italy and (briefly) Malta and he died from cholera in San Sebastiano Curone, near Tortona, north of Genoa, on 25 August 1836.
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