Nathan Banks

Nathan Banks built a career as an American entomologist and arachnologist whose catalogue work ranged across spiders, mites, lacewings, and related groups. New West Indian Spiders Bulletin of the AMNH records part of that taxonomic practice, describing specimens collected in Cuba and Puerto Rico and placing their types in the American Museum of Natural History. Banks trained at Cornell University before working for the United States Department of Agriculture. In 1916 he joined Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he served as curator of entomology until 1945 and built a major research collection. His publications combined close specimen description with the classification of poorly documented invertebrate groups. The West Indian paper is concise, but its attention to markings, anatomy, collection locality, and institutional type material shows how Banks established names that later researchers could test against preserved specimens. His career linked federal biological work, museum curation, and systematic study across several branches of arthropod zoology.