Adalbert Fenyes: a biographical sketch of a twentieth century entomologist

摘要

In 1897 the recently married thirty-four year old Hungarian physician and naturalist Adalbert Fenyes (1863-1937) rented a house in Pasadena, California with the intention of permanently leaving the Old World and settling down in this burgeoning Far Western city with his American heiress wife Eva Scott Fenyes (Adalbert Fenyes Papers, Pasadena Museum of History).Of aristocratic background, Dr. Fenyes was a trained scientist, graduating with a degree in neurology from the University of Vienna only a few years after Sigmund Freud. He then practiced medicine at spas in Helwan, Egypt, where he met and married the New York born divorcee, millionairess and painter, Eva, in 1896. During the next forty years he lived a vital and creative life practicing medicine, bringing new scientific technology, particularly the X-ray machine, to Pasadena, and, with Eva, commissioning the building of their mansion (Watters 2007).Most importantly, his scientific avocation was collecting, preserving and classifying a subfamily of beetles named Aleocharinae, a subfamily of rove beetles, the largest and taxonomically most complex lineage of staphylinid beetles that one scientist called "one of the great monophyletic radiations in the history of life" (Ashe & Maus 1998).