Our curiosity about the life and works of William Saville-Kent (1845–1908) (Fig. 1) was ignited while gathering information on the ciliate Gerda glans for another ‘Archives’ article (Esteban and Finlay 2002). When we began to dig deeper into the life of this “in- defatigable explorer and student of nature” ( London Daily News 1893), we realised we were dealing with an unusual and prolific scientist and, as we discov- ered, one of the unsung heroes of natural history ex- ploration in the Victorian era. The protistological world knows of Saville-Kent because he coined the term ‘choanoflagellate’ and he produced the first 2 English text with original re- search on the Protozoa – the extraordinary achieve- ment of the Manual of the Infusoria (1880–1882) – a work of more than 900 pages and over 2000 figures. This alone would justify a lifetime in science, but the facts about the man are even more impressive. The Manual was actually completed in a few years and is only one of many substantial works he produced. He is, for example, better known in the world at large for his “sumptuous” Great Barrier Reef of Australia; he described the bipedal locomotion of the frilled lizard in the magazine Nature, and new species of corals. He is perhaps best known for having pro- duced the first, spherical, cultured pearls, and he was superintendent of fisheries in Tasmania and commissioner of fisheries to the colonial govern- Saville-Kent’s String of Pearls Genoveva F. Esteban a,1 , John O. Corliss b , and Bland J. Finlay a a Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Windermere Laboratory, The Ferry House, Far Sawrey, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 0LP, UK b P. O. Box 2729, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004, USA FROM THE ARCHIVES 1 Corresponding author; fax 44 15394 46914 e-mail gent@ceh.ac.uk 2 Notwithstanding the superb work by Pritchard (1861, 4 th edi- tion!), which includes a remarkable account of the history and biology of the infusoria and other protists. 1434-4610/02/153/04-413 $ 15.00/0 Protist, Vol. 153, 413–430, December 2002 © Urban & Fischer Verlag http://www.urbanfischer.de/journals/protist Published online 20 December 2002 Protist Figure 1. William Saville-Kent’s portrait as it appears in the frontispiece of The Naturalist in Australia (Kent 1897). The photogravure is by Waterlow & Sons, and the negative by Maull & Fox. The latter had a photo- graphic studio in London, and they were highly praised. They specialised in portraits of noted individu- als. The photograph was probably taken in 1892.