British naval surgeon and entomologist. Born in Penzance, Cornwall, Pascoe trained in medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He went on to become a naval surgeon, serving in Australia, the West Indies and the Mediterranean, and later travelled to make entomological collections.

After marrying Mary Glasson in the early 1840s Pascoe left the navy and settled on land at Trewhiddle near St. Austell. Mary owned land leased to a china clay company and the couple were well off. They had four children, but Pascoe was left a widower in 1851 and moved to London, sharing their upbringing with his mother-in-law. He gained a reputation as an entomologist (though his first scientific paper was in the Botanical Gazette in 1850), travelling to North Africa, South America and Europe on collecting expeditions, sometimes accompanied by his daughters, and also gathering plant material. He mostly worked with collections of insects made by others, however, as his own were not terribly good. He listed insect species collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, P. Bouchard and Robert Templeton, for example.

Pascoe was a Fellow of the Entomological Society and of the Linnean Society (from 1852). A correspondent of Charles Darwin, he supported the theory of evolution, but did not believe in natural selection. Pascoe spent his later years in Sussex, at Tunbridge Wells and Brighton. His entomological collections were passed to the Natural History Museum in London, while his botanical specimens have been dispersed to many herbaria.

Sources:
B.B. Woodward, rev. Y. Foote, first published Sept 2004, "Pascoe, Francis Polkinghorne (1813-1893)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21494, accessed 23 August 2010.