MacLeay, William John (1820-1891)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Sir William John Macleay (June 13, 1820 – 7 December 1891) was an Australian politician, zoologist and naturalist. Macleay was born at Wick, Scotland. Educated at the Edinburgh Academy he began to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, but when he was 18 years old his widowed mother died, and he decided to go to Australia with his cousin, W. S. Macleay; they arrived at Sydney in March 1839. William Macleay took up land at first near Goulburn, and afterwards on the Murrumbidgee River. Macleay lived in Sydney from 1857, the year of his marriage to Susan Emmeline Deas-Thomson, and was now able to develop his interest in science. He had made a small collection of insects, and in 1861 began to extend it considerably. In April 1862 a meeting was held at his house and it was decided to found a local Entomological Society. Macleay was elected president and held the position for two years. The society lasted 11 years and, not only was Macleay the author of the largest number of papers, he also bore most of the expense. He had succeeded to the Macleay collection on the death of W. S. Macleay in 1865, and in 1874 decided to extend it from an entomological collection into a zoological collection. In this year the Linnean Society of New South Wales was founded, of which he was elected the first president, and in May 1875, having fitted up the barque Chevert, he sailed for New Guinea, where he obtained what he described as "a vast and valuable collection" of zoological specimens. After his return from New Guinea Macleay spent much time in fostering the Linnean Society. He presented many books and materials for scientific work to it, which were all destroyed when the garden palace was burnt down in September 1882. In spite of this blow the society continued on its way and gradually built up another library. In 1885 Macleay erected a building for the use of the society in Ithaca-road, Elizabeth Bay, and endowed it with the sum of £14,000. He had contributed several papers to the Proceedings of the society, and in 1881 his Descriptive Catalogue of Australian Fishes was published in two volumes. Three years later a Supplement to this catalogue appeared, and in the same year his Census of Australian Snakes was reprinted from the Proceedings. He had hoped to make a descriptive catalogue of the Dipterous insects of Australia, but his health began to fail and he did not get far with it.

William John Macleay took possession of the Macleay Natural History Collections in 1865, soon after the death of his cousin William Sharp Macleay. In 1874 he decided to enlarge the collections considerably to cover most areas of natural history. The following year he funded and organised the first Australian funded scientific expedition to the Torres Strait and New Guinea. For the journey he brought a boat named the Chevert and fitted it out for the collecting expedition. On this journey he amassed what he described as "a vast and valuable collection" of fish, reptiles, corals, vertebrates, invertebrates and birds as well as ethnographic artifacts. By the 1880s the collections had outgrown the capacity of the Macleay family home, Elizabeth Bay House, to hold them. Macleay offered to donate the collections to the University of Sydney as soon as a suitable building was ready.

Macleay was a member of the Legislative Assembly of NSW, the University of Sydney Senate, a founding member of the Entomological Society of NSW and the inaugural president of the Linnean Society of NSW. His association with the University began in 1857, when he married the daughter of Edward Deas Thomson, a future Chancellor of the University. His decision to leave the Macleay collections in the safekeeping of the University of Sydney as opposed to the University of Cambridge may have been influenced by this association.

Macleay died in 1891 only four years after the construction of the Macleay Museum.

ANT TAXONOMY
Ectatomma socialis sp. n.

PUBLICATIONS

 * MacLeay, W. 1873. Miscellanea entomologica. Trans. Entomol. Soc. N. S. W. 2: 319-370

REFERENCE

 * Holland, J. 1988. The MacLeay's celebrated cabinet. 171pp. Sydney. pp. 39-56, portrait.