page_title: William Yarrell
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: William Yarrell / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: A memorial to William Yarrell in St James's Church, Piccadilly.
context_page_description: William Yarrell was an English zoologist, prolific writer, bookseller and naturalist admired by his contemporaries for his precise scientific work.
  Yarrell is best known as the author of The History of British Fishes and A History of British Birds featuring 564 original engravings. The latter went into several editions and was the standard reference work for a generation of British ornithologists. He described Bewick's swan in 1830, distinguishing it from the larger whooper swan.
context_section_description: Yarrell died during a trip to Great Yarmouth and a memorial was erected in St James's Church, Piccadilly. He was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's in Bayford, Hertfordshire, with his chosen epitaph "He was the survivor of twelve brothers and sisters, who, with their father and mother, are all placed close to this spot" together with William Wordsworth's lines "first and last, The earliest summon'd and the longest spared — Are here deposited."
  Yarrell has a number of species named after him, including the birds yellow-faced siskin (Carduelis yarrellii) and Chilean woodstar (Eulidia yarrellii) and the fish Yarrell's blenny (Chirolophis ascanii). The British subspecies of the white wagtail, the pied wagtail (Motacilla alba yarrellii), was also named for him.
caption: A memorial to William Yarrell in St James's Church, Piccadilly.
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