Henry Meyners Bernard


Henry Meyners Bernard was a British biologist, carcinologist, palaeontologist, mathematician and cleric, and an authority on solifuges, corals and trilobites. He was the third of six children born to Alfred George Farquhar Bernard and Elizabeth Antoinette Moor.
After graduating from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Bernard served curacies in Wells and Herefordshire before six years as chaplain of the English Church in Moscow, which he left to study biology and zoology under Professor Ernst Haeckel at Jena. Bernard then catalogued corals and fossils at the British Museum, publishing numerous papers and monographs. In addition he wrote 'The Sense of Sight: Sketch of a New Theory', 'A Suggested Origin of the Segmented Worms', and 'The Problem of Metamerism', 'Studies in the Retina' and co-authored a 'Texbook of Comparative Anatomy'. He became a Fellow of the Linnean and Zoological Societies. He was a socialist, and wrote The Scientific Basis of Socialism: Two Essays in Evolution. He died at 109, West End Lane, London, N.W.
The crustacean family Apodidae was later renamed Triopsidae as it duplicated the family name used for swifts.

Personal life

He married on 19 November 1883 in Vienna, Austria to Maida Mirrielees, Russian-born daughter of Archibald Mirrielees, founder of Muir & Mirrielees Co., a high end department store in Moscow. They had three children
His youngest brother Charles Grant Bugden Bernard was the great-great grandfather of Justin Trudeau, 23rd Prime Minister of Canada.

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