J.S. Armstrong

A short biography of JOHN S. ARMSTRONG (born: June 9, 1892, North Allerton, Yorkshire, England; died: Feb. 7, 1977, Taupo, New Zealand; surgeon, general medical practitioner and well-known entomologist) is followed by a list of his odonatological publications (1958-1978), all of which are devoted to the New Zealand fauna. During his long, varied and productive life J.S. ARMSTRONG had witnessed great changes, particularly in the natural communities of plants and animals for which he had such a close affection. The rapidity and extent of these changes must have been further accentuated for him because he himself was the custodian of a family tradition in natural history (a collection of insects he bequeathed to the War Memorial Museum in Auckland before his death had been assembled by four generations of his family, beginning in 1810). He was a man of wide ability, and for many years played an active and leading role in community affairs in Taupo. He saw, and helped to guide, great changes there also during a period when the town’s population increased more than an hundredfold. In his approach to scientific and human problems John Armstrong was very much an interdisciplinary man; accordingly this account will lack balance in so far as it must necessarily be confined to activities related to his contributions to our knowledge of Odonata.