Castelo de Paiva (António da Costa Paiva, Baron of)

This distinguished physician and naturalist was born in Porto on 12 October 1806 and died in Funchal on 4 June 1879. He was a bachelor (bacharel, university graduate) in philosophy of the University of Coimbra (Universidade de Coimbra), a doctor of medicine of the Paris faculty, a professor at the Porto Polytechnic Academy (Academia Politécnica do Porto) and a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences (Academia das Sciencias de Lisboa).

In 1855 the Portuguese Government commissioned him to study the island of Madeira from an agricultural and economic point of view. He took the opportunity to carry out numerous botanical and zoological investigations throughout the archipelago, assembling a herbarium of 515 species, which he presented in 1863 to the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, and an excellent collection of land shells. His Monographia Molluscorum terrestrium, fluvialium, lacustrium insularum Maderensium (Lisbon, 1867) is, in the opinion of distinguished specialists, the most accurate and conscientious work yet published on the malacology of our archipelago.

The Baron of Castelo de Paiva also visited the Canary Islands, where he made various botanical, malacological and entomological observations. The herbarium he assembled in those islands is at present, like the Madeiran one, in the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (Universidade de Lisboa).

Besides the Monographia mentioned above, he wrote an 11-page report dealing with Madeira from an agricultural and economic point of view (Lisbon, 1855), and the following scientific works: Noticia da descoberta de dois molluscos novos e tambem dos typos vivos de duas especies fosseis do archipelago madeirense (Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist, 1862), Description of a new Sempervivum from the Salvage Island (Seeman’s Journ. Bot., 1866), Description de deux espèces nouvelles de mollusques terrestres de l’archipel de Madère (Journ. de Conchyl, VI, 1866), etc.