116 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814—1914. 
One of the last undertakings in which Dr. Anderson 
engaged, as soon as the Upper Nile Valley was once more 
thrown open to civilization, was the systematic collection and 
description of the fish inhabiting the river and its tributaries. 
That this important work (of which a notice appeared in 
“ Nature’’ of February 23rd, 1899) is now being carried out 
with warm interest and assistance from the Egyptian Govern¬ 
ment, must be attributed to Dr. Anderson’s foresight, zeal 
and skilful advocacy. Both in our Indian Empire and in 
North-Eastern Africa, Dr. Anderson contributed much to the 
solution of one of the chief biological questions of the present 
day^ an accurate knowledge of the distribution of animal 
life. 
JAMES WOOD-MASON, I 
Assistant Curator and afterwards Superintendent of the Indian 
Museum, 1869—1893. 
James Wood-Mason was born in December 1846, and was 
educated at Charterhouse and Oxford. He early evinced an 
inclination towards Natural Science, being at first specially 
interested in Geology, and even before his twenty-third year 
he had published several palaeontological papers in the Pro¬ 
ceedings and in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological 
Society. In 1869 he came out to India as Assistant Curator 
of the Indian Museum, for which post he had been selected by 
Professor Huxley and Sir Joseph Hooker, and in 1870 he 
became a member of this Society. 
His interest in Natural Science was shown immediately 
he joined the Society [i.e. the Asiatic Society of Bengal], 
when he contributed his first paper—“ On Polydactylism 
in a Horse ”—to the Proceedings, and was sustained 
throughout the whole twenty-two years of his membership, 
during the greater part of which period—until he began 
to be incapacitated by serious organic disease—he was a 
constant contributor to the Proceedings and Journal. His 
papers in the Society’s publications exhibit the compre¬ 
hensive extent of his attainments, embodying as they do 
^ Obituary notice by A. Alcock in Proc, Asiat. Soc. Bengal for 1893, p. 110. 
