J. H. Emerton

J. H. Emerton (1847–1931) was an American arachnologist and scientific illustrator, born in Salem, Massachusetts. Largely self-taught, he worked at the Peabody Academy of Science in Salem and at Yale, studied for a time in Leipzig, and earned his living for many years as an illustrator and maker of museum models, drawing the plates for other men's monographs on insects, worms and mollusks. His own papers on the spiders of New England, published from the 1870s onward, described hundreds of new species, and The Common Spiders of the United States of 1902 made the subject accessible to naturalists. He was still collecting in Canada in his eighties.