H. E. Hinton

Who was H. E. Hinton?

Professor Howard Everest Hinton, FRS was a British entomologist. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of insects and was inordinately fond of beetles. He published 309 scientific papers, many of which were concerned with insect morphology and taxonomy. He founded and edited the Journal of Insect Physiology. He introduced an extra stage in the metamorphosis of insects, the pharate stage, in which the insect has produced a new exoskeleton in preparation for ecdysis but is still enclosed in the remnants of the old one. He was an early proponent of continental drift, based on the close relationship between non-migratory water beetles of the family Elmidae in rivers in New Guinea and northern Australia. He worked extensively on insect eggs, particularly the way in which they respire.

Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and then worked at the Natural History Museum in London. In 1949, he moved to the University of Bristol where he spent the rest of his life.

Howard Hinton married Margaret Clark, a teacher, in 1938 and they had four children, Charlotte who became a headmistress, James who became a Professor of History at the University of Warwick, Geoffrey Hinton who is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and Teresa who is a social policy researcher in Tasmania. His father, George Hinton, was a mining engineer and botanist who managed a silver mine in Mexico and collected many new botanical specimens, some of which are in Kew gardens. Howard Hinton's nephew, also called George Hinton, has a farm in Mexico and discovered a new genus of cacti that are named after him.