CHAPTEE IX. 
CURATORS AND SUPERINTENDENTS. 
The present chapter consists of short biographies of the 
more distinguished occupants of the posts of Superintendent 
and Curator of the Asiatic Society’s Museum, and their suc¬ 
cessors in the direct line as Superintendents of the Indian 
Museum. It is explained at the end of chapter vii how it 
came about that all but the first few of these officers have 
been zoologists. 
The biographies are derived from different sources. 
Those of James Wood-Mason and John Anderson are re¬ 
printed verbatim from the Journal of the Asiatic Society of 
Bengal, and are by their successor Lieutenant-Colonel A. W. 
Alcock, F.R.S. That of Blyth is in part by the editor of this 
volume, in part extracted with considerable compression and 
other verbal changes from an obituary notice in the same 
Journal by the late Mr. A. Grote. The account of Colonel 
Alcock’s work in India is by his successor, and follows for 
the most part a note published in the Records of the Indian 
Museum at the time of his retirement. Major A. T. Gage, 
I.M.S., Director of the Botanical Survey of India, has kindly 
supplied the article on Nathaniel Wallich, whose life he is at 
present studying while on leave in England. The short notice 
of John M’Clelland is compiled from an article on What the 
Indian Medical Service has done for India” in volume XLVII 
of the Indian Medical Gazette (June, 1912), from Sir Clements 
Markham’s Memoir on the Indian Surveys (London ; 1878), 
from the Centenary Review of the Asiatic Society (1885), and 
from the introductions to his own geological papers. 
We have to thank Archdeacon Firminger for making 
inquiries, unfortunately without result, into M’Clelland’s 
life in Calcutta, and have also to acknowledge the courtesy of 
the Council of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in permitting us 
to make free use of the Society’s publications in the prepara¬ 
tion of this chapter, and, indeed, throughout the book. 
