Sir Joseph Fayrer. Ixix 
of Council in 1895. As President of the Medical Board at the India: Office, 
he had much to do with matters of public health, and in addition to his 
official work, he became President of the Epidemiological Society, in 1879, 
gave the Croonian Lectures on the “Climate and Fevers of India,” at the 
Royal College of Physicians, in 1882, represented the Government of India 
at the International Cholera Conference,in Rome, in 1884, and was President 
of the Section of Preventive Medicine in the Hygienic Congress in London, 
in 1891. 
He was a good linguist, and was obliged to acquire a fair knowledge of 
Hindostani and Persian, in order to conduct the correspondence necessitated 
by the offices he held at Lucknow. He knew sutficient Italian to be qualified 
to pass the examinations for M.D. at Rome, and to make a speech in Italian 
when he was representing the Royal College ot Physicians at the Tercentenary 
of Galileo at Padua. 
The law regarding experiments on animals prevented him and Brunton 
from continuing the researches on antidotes to snake venom they were 
making in 1875, but in 1903 Captain Leonard Rogers was able to continue 
their work by means of Professor A. D. Waller’s method of keeping animals 
continuously under chloroform for thirty-six hours or more. In conjunction 
with him they published a joint paper in the ‘ Roy. Soc. Proc.,’ 1904, vol. 73, 
p. 323, and the method there described has since been successful in saving 
several lives which would otherwise have been lost. 
In trying to sum up Fayrer’s work, one meets with the great diffieulty that 
so much of it was official, and the credit for such work goes rather to the 
office than to the individual. Thus the enormous amount of good which he 
did in his official capacity cannot be estimated, except from the official recog- 
nition it received, not only during the Burmese War, but in every office which 
he filled. 
His chief scientific work consisted in his early meteorological observations, 
his proposal of an ethnological investigation of the races of India, his 
foundation of a Zoological Society and Zoological Gardens at Calcutta, his 
contributions to sanitation and to the pathology of Indian diseases, and, most 
of all, in his work on venomous snakes. His monumental work on the 
Thanatophidia of India is the best and most comprehensive on the subject, 
and the researches which he began in India, and continued with the collabora- 
tion of others in England, have now led to a method of treating the bites of 
venomous snakes, which can be applied to bites of all kinds, and used every- 
where. 
There was a remarkable similarity, in many respects, between Fayrer and 
his friend and fellow-student Huxley, and this likeness was the attraction 
which drew them together, and led to their close friendship. It has been said 
that in every buman face a resemblance may be traced to some animal, and 
this was markedly the case both in Fayrer and Huxley. Especially in his 
later years, Huxley’s face andhead suggested that of a lion, while Fayrer’s 
large open forehead and calm expression reminded one of an elephant, and one 
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