Louis B. Prout, an English entomologist and musicologist,
was the son of the composer Ebenezer Prout. As a musicologist he wrote several papers on harmony and two books: Side-lights on harmony and, as co-author with his father, Analysis of J.S. Bach's forty-eight fugues. As an entomologist he specialised in the Lepidoptera
(butterflies and moths), particularly the family Geometridae (Geometer moths),
on which he was a world authority. His observations and publications formed the
basis of the card index of the Geometridae in the British Natural History
Museum. He was the secretary of the North London Natural History Society and
worked in association with the Natural History Museum at Tring, some 60 km
northwest of London.
Prout published dozens of papers on the Geometridae during
his career, between 1907 and 1937. Included were descriptions of new species in
the Tring Museum (1923, 1926) and in several other collections; new species from
Africa (1911, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1926, 1928, 1932) and India (1926); and
taxonomic papers dealing with the sub-families of the Geometridae. Some of his
papers dealt specifically with new species in South African collections. In the
Annals of the Transvaal Museum he
described 'New South African Geometridae' (1913, 1916), 'New South African
Heterocera' (1922), and 'Scientific results of the Vernay-Lang Kalahari
Expedition, March to September 1930: The Geometridae' (1935). He also described
new species of Geometridae in the collection of the South African Museum (Annals of the South African Museum, 1917,
1925).
