Born in Tilly, Ontario, Walter Peter Booth graduated from McGill in arts in 1912, and with a Bachelor of Divinity from the Wesleyan College (Montréal) in 1915. Prior to graduation he served as a probationer and student assistant in Presbyterian and Methodist Churches in Québec, Ontario and Vermont (1903), and thereafter as pastor of Congregationalist churches in the United States. For most of his professional life he worked not as a clergyman but as an insurance salesman and elocutionist: he was the author of the "Booth Daily Intelligence Test" (ca 1932).

Léonard Bordas, also known as Professor Bordas, was born in 1864 in Égletons, Corrèze, in the New Aquitaine region of southwestern France, to a father who worked as a sawyer.

He was a French naturalist, entomologist, and educator. He excelled in his studies of natural sciences and graduated in natural history. Bordas taught at the University of Rennes, where he later served as the dean and then the rector of his faculty. Upon his death, he left a substantial collection of insects and scientific reports to the Albert Thomas College in Égletons.