Biography

Edward Turner Bennett (1797-1836), zoologist, was born in Hackney, Middlesex, on 6 January 1797, the son of Edward Turner Bennett and his wife, Lucy. He practised as a surgeon in Portman Square, having been a pupil at the anatomy school operated by the surgeon Joshua Brookes. Bennett was interested in zoology and became a prominent member of the Zoological Club of the Linnean Society. In 1828 he became vice-secretary of the newly founded Zoological Society of London, whose secretary, Nicholas Aylward Vigors, seems to have been his patron. In 1833 Bennett was himself elected secretary of the Zoological Society. Bennett wrote The Tower Menagerie (1829) and edited The Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society Delineated (2 vols., 1830, 1831), to which Vigors, Broderip, Wallich, and Yarrell also contributed; in addition he contributed many papers to the Proceedings and Transactions of the Zoological Society and to other natural history periodicals of his time. He was working on an edition of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne at the time of his early death. He never married, and died on 21 August 1836 at Bulstrode Street, London.

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