OBITUARY. 273 



Mines iu 1854, he passed a year at Freiberg in Saxony, in the study of 

 chemistry, mineralogy, mining, and metallurgy. It was in this year that 

 he and his brother were offered and accepted posts on the Geological 

 Survey of India, and it is from this date that an active scientific career 

 commenced which was only terminated by death. 



Dr. Blanford was one of those few men who are really scholars in 

 the domain of their subject. His first published paper, in 1854, was 

 " On a Section lately exposed in some Excavations at the West India 

 Docks"; his almost last was in 1901, on " The Distribution of Verte- 

 brate Animals in India, Ceylon, and Burma," printed in the Trans. Roy. 

 Soc. He was attached as geologist and zoologist to the Abyssinian 

 Expedition in 1867, which resulted in the publication of a well-known 

 and valued volume ; while subsequently another volume on the 

 ' Zoology and Geology of Persia ' was the outcome of his journey 

 with another expedition. As a result of his labours in the Geological 

 Survey, he had traversed, in the course of nine years, the whole 

 peninsula on foot or on horseback, with the exception of some twenty 

 or thirty miles, from the Arabian Sea near Surat to the Bay of Bengal 

 at Coconada. 



His zoological work, however, is focused in the volumes devoted 

 to the ' Fauna of British India,' of which the vertebrates have been 

 described and the invertebrates commenced. Some of these volumes 

 he wrote, and all published to date he edited, and it seems only the 

 other day, though the date was 1881, that at his request we supplied 

 him with some statistics relating to the then scanty knowledge of 

 the Indian Insecta, which he included in a paper " On our Present 

 Knowledge of the Fauna inhabiting British India and its Depen- 

 dencies," read before a meeting of the British Association. To have 

 inaugurated and so long edited with conspicuous ability this well- 

 known series of volumes is to have engraved his name in faunistic 

 zoology. He was a good and conscientious editor, as those who served 

 under him will admit ; always courteous, he was yet constant to his 

 own opinion, and when any divergence of view arose he was generally 

 found in the sequel to be in the right, and if in a very few instances 

 the contrary was the case, he was the first to acknowledge it. It is 

 unnecessary to refer to the high posts he from time to time held in our 

 scientific societies ; suffice it to say he died in harness, after living a 

 worthy and strenuous life in advancing the study of natural science, 

 and died really regretted by his friends, and respected in all scientific 

 circles. 



Zool. 4th ser. vol. IX., July, 1905. 



