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1969
Journal of the LepidopteHsts' Society
135
ERNEST E. PLATT, A SOUTH AFRICAN LEPIDOPTERIST
(July 3, 1874-August 28, 1966)
In 1897 a young man, 23 years of age, arrived in Durban intending to make a living as a printer. I never knew why he had selected Port Natal (as Durban was best known overseas in those days), but neither did I get the impression that he had come with the intention of studying nature.
On arrival at Durban he was engaged by the printing firm of T. L. Cullingworth as a compositor, but three years later he started on his own with a fellow worker, H. A. Wilson. Together they formed a. small company called the Electric Press as it was the first printing works in Durban that used electricity for running the presses.
136
Janse: E. E. Piatt
Vol. 23, no. 2
This was where I met Mr. Piatt for the first time in 1912 when I was introduced to him by a collector of butterflies, Mr. Edgar Clark.
Durban had at that time at least six insect collectors, most of them were especially interested in butterflies. No big town anywhere in South Africa at that time, and for many years afterwards, had so many insect collectors. Durban in those days had many streets with patches of original vegetation, and at times butterflies swarmed in the main streets. Most of the bluff opposite the bay was an area of virgin soil covered with subtropical bush, swarming with insect life. No wonder that my friend Piatt soon joined the enthusiastic band of butterfly collectors. But he was not a mere collector for long. Soon he became fascinated by the intriguing life-histories of the Lepidoptera. In addition he started collecting and cultivating orchids in the hothouse where caterpillars and their food plants had been the only occupants.
During the past 20 years he went to no end of trouble to get the food plants required and I have known him to go on a Sunday as far as Eshowe when finally the natural bush nearby had to make way for the cultivation of sugar cane. Also in those days several rivers had to be crossed by drifts, as bridges were few and far between while the roads were often mere muddy tracks in the summer.
Almost from the beginning he made notes of his caterpillar breeding; photographs were taken of the caterpillars while on the food plants which he had identified at the Natal Herbarium; and at least one caterpillar of each species was preserved. The Lepidoptera, thus bred, often from the egg stage onwards, he generously presented, with the cabinets, to the Grahamstown Museum as unfortunately its entomological collection had been destroyed by fire. The notebooks, negatives of the photos and the preserved caterpillars and pupae he presented to the Transvaal Museum.
The list of the Lepidoptera foodplants which he compiled, as published in volume III of the South African Journal of Natural History in 1921, is thus a reliable document of what was known up to that date, and no other worker had contributed so much to the study of the life-histories of the South African Lepidoptera as had been compiled by the late Ernest Piatt.
A. J. T. Janse, Pretoria, South Africa