George Darby Haviland, British surgeon and naturalist, was the son of (Reverend prebendary) George Edward Haviland and his wife Mary Jane, born Darby. He was the director of the Raffles Museum in Singapore and from 1891 to 1893 was a medical officer in Sarawak, Indonesia, and curator of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching. In 1895 he returned to England and worked in the herbarium at Kew Gardens. In 1897 he published "A revision of the tribe Naucleeae (Nat. Ord. Rubiaceae)" in the Journal of the Linnean Society (Botany). Nauclea is a large genus of mainly tropical Asian trees and plants.
Haviland was the author of an undated work, Some factors in the evolution of adaptations, published in London. An early paper by him, "A sparrow's antipathy to purple", appeared in Nature in 1892. However, his most important work related to the study of termites. With David Sharp as co-author he published a paper on "Termites in captivity in England" in the Transactions of the Entomological Society (1896). Two years later he wrote "Observations on termites, with descriptions of new species", which was published in the Journal of the Linnean Society (Zoology) (1898, 85p) and later, under a slightly different title, also in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1901.
In 1894 Haviland visited his brother, Arthur Edward Haviland*, in Natal. There he collected and either identified or described ten species of termites. These were donated to the South African Museum by his brother in 1898. His observations on Natal termites were used after his death by Dr Ernest Warren* to compile "Notes on the life-histories of Natal termites..." for the Annals of the Natal Museum (1909). Haviland may have remained in Natal to his death in 1901.
