John George Children was a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 chemist

Chemist

A chemist is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties such as density and acidity. Chemists carefully describe the properties they study in terms of quantities, with detail on the level of molecules and their component atoms...

, mineralogist and zoologist.

Children studied at Queens' College, Cambridge

Queens' College, Cambridge

Queens' College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England.The college was founded in 1448 by Margaret of Anjou , and refounded in 1465 by Elizabeth Woodville...

. In 1822 he was working as a librarian in the Department of Antiquities at the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 when he was appointed assistant keeper of the Natural History Department in succession to William Elford Leach

William Elford Leach

William Elford Leach FRS was an English zoologist and marine biologist.Leach was born at Hoe Gate, Plymouth, the son of a solicitor. At the age of twelve he went to school in Exeter, studying anatomy and chemistry. By this time he was already collecting marine samples from Plymouth Sound and along...

. The appointment was controversial as he was less qualified than another applicant, William John Swainson. After the division of the Department into three sections in 1837 he became keeper of the Department of Zoology, retiring in 1840 and succeeded by his assistant John Edward Gray

John Edward Gray

John Edward Gray, FRS was a British zoologist. He was the elder brother of George Robert Gray and son of the pharmacologist and botanist Samuel Frederick Gray ....

.

Children was made a fellow of the Royal Society

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

 in 1807, and served as the society's secretary in 1826, and from 1830 to 1837.

In 1833, he was founding president of what became the Royal Entomological Society of London

Royal Entomological Society of London

The Royal Entomological Society of London is devoted to insect study. It has a major national and international role in disseminating information about insects and improving communication between entomologists....

.

His name is commemorated in the Australian Children's python, Antaresia childreni, the Australian stick insect Tropidoderus childrenii, the North American lady beetle Exochomus childreni,
and the mineral childrenite

Childrenite

Childrenite is a rare hydrated phosphate mineral with elements iron, manganese, aluminium, phosphorus, oxygen and hydrogen. Its chemical formula is AlPO42 • H2O and it has a molecular weight of 229.83 g/mol. Its specific gravity is 3.2 and it has a Mohs hardness of 4.5 to 5. It is usually...

. John James Audubon

John James Audubon

John James Audubon was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats...

 named a warbler after him, but the specimen turned out to be a juvenile Yellow Warbler

Yellow Warbler

Dendroica petechia is a New World warbler species or superspecies; the subspecies group around D. aestiva is increasingly treated as good species Dendroica aestiva again. The name for the entire cryptic species complex is Mangrove Warbler, and another group of subspecies is known as Golden Warbler...

.

His daughter was Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins

Anna Atkins was an English botanist and photographer. She is often considered the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. Some sources claim that she was the first woman to create a photograph.-Early life:Anna Children was born in Tonbridge, Kent, England in 1799...

, a botanist, who is best-known for her book of cyanotype

Cyanotype

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that gives a cyan-blue print. The process was popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. The simple and low-cost process enabled them to produce large-scale copies of their work, referred to as blueprints...

 photogram

Photogram

A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used...

s of algae

Algae

Algae are a large and diverse group of simple, typically autotrophic organisms, ranging from unicellular to multicellular forms, such as the giant kelps that grow to 65 meters in length. They are photosynthetic like plants, and "simple" because their tissues are not organized into the many...

, the first book of exclusively photograph

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

ic images ever made.