Walter Elliot (ICS)
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Sir Walter Elliot (1803-1887), Born in Edinburgh, studied at the East India College in Haileybury and joined the Indian Civil Service at Madras in 1821 and worked on till 1860.
He became a Member of the Council of the Governor of Madras and had a wide range of interests including Botany, Zoology, Indian languages and geology. He rescued the Amaravathi Marbles, which are now housed in the British Museum along with his coin collection and collection of other artifacts. He compiled a major catalogue of the coins of South India in 1884 Numismata Orientalia.
Sir Walter Elliot lived in Randals Road, Vepery, Madras and during this time, his house was the beehive of several national and international oriental scholars.
He was in correspondence with Charles Darwin and at his request he sent him skins of various domestic birds from India and Burma in 1856. He also collaborated with naturalists in India like Thomas C. Jerdon. He catalogued the mammals of southern India in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science and described several new species of small mammals including the rat species Golunda ellioti and the Madras Tree-Shrew Anathana ellioti and W. T. Blanford wrote to him that
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- "Very little work is now done on mammals in India. Everybody has gone into ornithology. So far as I am aware your paper in the Madras journal is the only good account.."
In 1874 he wrote on the contributions of Thomas C. Jerdon to the journal Nature, however this was not published for want of space. [1]
He also produced a work on ethnobotany Flora Andhirica in 1859 which give the Telugu names for various plant species in the Northern Circars, north of the Godavari delta area. He also collected plants and his herbarium was gifted to the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh.
After retiring as Member of the Governor's Council at Madras in 1860, he went back to Roxburghshire where he continued to work on local natural history .
[edit] References
- Muthiah, S. 2004. Madras Rediscovered: A Historical Guide to Looking Around, Supplemented with Tales of 'Once Upon a City'.
