William Thomas Blanford

William Thomas Blanford.

William Thomas Blanford (7 October 1832 – 23 June 1905) was an English geologist and naturalist. He is best remembered as the editor of a major series on The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma.

Biography

Blanford was born in London. He was educated in private schools in Brighton and Paris, and spent two years in a business house at Civitavecchia aiming to enter a mercantile career. On returning to England in 1851 he was induced to enter the newly established Royal School of Mines (now part of Imperial College London), which his younger brother Henry F. Blanford (1834 – 1893), afterwards head of the Indian Meteorological Department, had already joined. He studied under Henry De la Beche, Lyon Playfair, Edward Forbes, Ramsay, and Warrington Smyth. He then spent a year in the mining school at Freiberg, Saxony, and towards the close of 1854 both he and his brother obtained posts on the Geological Survey of India. In that service he remained for twenty-seven years, retiring in 1882. After his retirement he took up editorship of The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma series.

He was engaged in various parts of India, in the Raniganj coalfield, in Bombay, and in the coalfield near Talcher, where boulders considered to have been ice-borne were found in the Talcher strata — a remarkable discovery confirmed by subsequent observations of other geologists in equivalent strata elsewhere.

His attention was given not only to geology but to zoology, and especially to the land gastropods and to the vertebrates. In 1866 he was attached to the Abyssinian expedition, accompanying the army to Magdala and back; and in 1871 – 1872 he was appointed a member of the Persian Boundary Commission along with O. B. St. John. After a voyage to Basra he started back from Gwadar, 200 miles west of Karachi. Marching to Shiraz with St. John's party and then travelled alone through Ispahan to Teheran to join Sir Richard Pollock. He visited the Elbruz Mountains and returned to England from the Caspian via Astrakhan, Moscow, St. Petersburg and Berlin to reach home in September 1872. The best use was made of the exceptional opportunities of studying the natural history of those countries. He subsequently spent time to produce the report on Zoology. He represented the Indian Government at the meeting of the Geological Congress in Bologna.

In 1883 he married Ida Gertrude Bellhouse, and settled at Bedford Gardens, Campden Hill.

For his many contributions to geological science, Blanford was in 1883 awarded the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London. For his labours on the zoology and geology of British India he received in 1901 a royal medal from the Royal Society. He had been elected F.R.S. in 1874, and was chosen president of the Geological Society in 1888. He was created C.I.E. in 1904. He died in London in 1905.

His principal publications were: Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia (1870), Manual of the Geology of India, with H. B. Medlicott (1879) and the third volume in Birds following the work of E. W. Oates in The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma series.

Bibliography

• 1879: A manual of the geology of India - volume 2 - with Henry Benedict Medlicott, Valentine Ball, Frederick Richard Mallet

• 1888: Mammalia
• 1889: Birds - volume 1 - with Eugene William Oates
• 1889: Birds - volume 2 - with Eugene William Oates
• 1889: Birds - volume 3 - with Eugene William Oates
• 1889: Birds - volume 4 - with Eugene William Oates

• 1889: The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Birds, volume 1 with Eugene William Oates
• 1889: The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Birds, volume 2 with Eugene William Oates
• 1889: The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Birds, volume 3 with Eugene William Oates

• Blanford W. T. & Godwin-Austen H. H. 1908: Mollusca. Testacellidae and Zonitidae. The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma.

• 1922: Birds - volume 1 - with Edward Charles Stuart Baker and with Eugene William Oates

Taxa named in honor

Taxa named in honor of William Thomas Blanford include:

• Blanfordia A. Adams, 1863
• Calandrella blanfordi (Shelley, 1902) - Blanford's Short-toed Lark
• Draco blanfordii Boulenger, 1885
• Acanthodactylus blanfordii Boulenger, 1918 - Blanford's Fringe-fingered Lizard
• Psammophilus blanfordanus (Stoliczka, 1871) - Blanford's Rock Agama
• Leptotyphlops blanfordii (Boulenger, 1890) - Blanford's worm snake
• English name of Vulpes cana (Blanford, 1877) is Blanford's Fox.

References

This article incorporates public domain text from the reference

• Anon. (1905) Obituary: William Thomas Blanford. Bulletin of the American Geographical Society. 37(11):689-690.
• Thomas George Bond Howes (1907) Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Vol. 79(535) (1907):xxvii-xxxi.
• Bo Beolens und Michael Watkins, Whose Bird?, Christopher Helm, London, 2003. ISBN 0-7136-6647-1

External links

• portrait and obituary
• Chrono-Biographical Sketch: William T. Blanford
• Eastern Persia: An account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission