2 Retirement of Lieuteitant-C olonel Alcock. [Voi,. 11, 



Mr. J. Wood-Mason, his predecessor as Superintendent, that was 

 fruitful in scientific work. On the death of Mr. Wood-Mason his 

 services were put at the disposal of the Trustees, and he became 

 Superintendent, without, however, leaving the Indian Medical 

 Service. 



In the Museum Colonel Alcock made it his aim to work out, so 

 far as it was possible for one man to do , the fauna of the deeper parts 

 of the Indian seas, to set in order the marine collection in the 

 Museum, and to exhibit to the public a judicious selection of the 

 animals identified or described by himself and others. The scien- 

 tific side of this work, in its more general aspect, is known to all 

 marine zoologists, being embodied in numerous papers and mono- 

 graphs and in his book " A Naturalist in Indian Seas," of which 

 there is more to be said. It was mainly on account of his mono- 

 graphs on marine zoology that Colonel Alcock was elected a Fellow 

 of the Royal Society and received the honorary degree of LL.D. 

 from his old University of Aberdeen. The work of arranging and 

 exhibiting the collections of the Museum has naturally a more 

 limited renown. There are few ]\Iuseums, however, which can boast 

 that their marine collections are in better order and better displayed 

 than is the case in Calcutta. The gradual development which has 

 made it possible to claim for the Indian Museum its place among 

 the great reference collections of the world is almost entireh^ due 

 to Colonel Alcock' s work in this direction. 



He did not, however, confine his attention, while connected 

 with the Museum, to marine zoology, as his reports on the zoolog}' 

 of the Pamir Commission and on the reptiles of the Afghan Frontier 

 Commission of 1895 and his biological notes in the publications of 

 the Asiatic Society of Bengal attest, while the many dissections 

 and other preparations he set up in the public galleries of reptiles 

 and other terrestrial vertebrates prove his care for the interests of 

 the students of the Calcutta Medical College, to whom he lectured 

 in disheartening circumstances as regards the absence of all oppor- 

 tunity for practical classes and the humble place as yet given 

 to zoology in the Indian medical curriculum. The bird and mammal 

 galleries are still perhaps the least satisfactory parts of the Museum, 

 but one man could not bring every section to equal perfection, and 

 those who remember their previous state can alone appreciate 

 what was done to improve them in Colonel Alcock's time. 



The " Naturalist in Indian Seas " (1902) may be regarded as an 

 epitome and a popularization (in the best sense of the word) of the 

 greater part of Colonel Alcock's scientific work in India. It is a 

 book that owes its value not only to its erudition and perspicuity 

 but hardly less to its literary style, in which the strong infusion, of 

 Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors is never pedantic, never 

 frivolous, and never dull. The skill with which such apparently 

 incongruous elements are fused even into the guide books he pre- 

 pared for the Museum galleries can only be realized by on-e. who 

 has attempted, and failed, to complete a work of the kind he left 

 unfinished. . . . : . . . .^ -w^^-,, 



