70 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814—1914. 
and conchologist, is often associated), Ferdinand Stoliczka 
and William Theobald. 
William Blanford ^ joined the Geological Survey of India 
in 1855 and retired in 1882. He died as recently as 1905. 
As a zoologist he is best known in connection with the official 
‘‘ Fauna of British India”, the inception of which was due 
to his untiring efforts. To this series he himself contributed 
the volume on the mammals and two of the four volumes on 
birds. A first volume on the mollusca that he had begun but 
left unfinished was completed by Colonel Godwun-Austen. 
Hardly less valuable to the study of zoology in this country is 
the long series of papers which he contributed to the Journal 
of the Asiatic Society before his retirement. He was one of 
the most active agents in the foundation of the Indian Mus¬ 
eum as a Government institution and also in the negotiations 
connected with the first zoological work of the ‘ Investigator.’ 
His private collections, gathered together in the course of 
his geological work in Persia and Abyssinia and in the Central 
Provinces, Orissa and other parts of the Indian Empire, 
were distributed to the Indian Museum in which the ma¬ 
jority of his types of vertebrate animals are still preserved, 
and to the British Museum, in which the molluscs that 
occupied the studies of his later retirement found a perma¬ 
nent resting-place. 
Ferdinand Stoliczka,® who came to India from Vienna as 
a member of the same service in 1862 and met an early 
death in Ladak on his return from an expedition to Central 
Asia in 1874, had an even wider outlook on the animal king¬ 
dom than Blanford; his investigations had reference to still 
more diverse groups of animals. He was the first natural¬ 
ist to give an adequate description of the internal anatomy 
of a sea-anemone; he was a pioneer in the study of Indian 
arachnology; he described a long series of Indian and 
Malayan molluscs, frogs and reptiles, and was able to turn 
i Obituary Notices by Sir Thomas Holland and Col. A. Alcock ; Rec. 
Geol. Survey India, Vol. XXXII, pp. 241-257 (1905). 
i Memoir on the Life and Work of the late Ferdinand Stoliczka by the 
late Dr. V. Ball ; Scientific Results of the Second Yarkand Mission^ 1878- 
1891. 
