Sir Walter Elliot Born in Edinburgh

Edinburgh

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...

, 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

Botany

Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...

, Zoology

Zoology

Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...

, Indian languages and geology

Geology

Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...

.
He rescued the Amaravathi Marbles, which are now housed in the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 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

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

 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

Thomas C. Jerdon

Thomas Caverhill Jerdon was a British physician, zoologist and botanist. He is best remembered for his pioneering works on the ornithology of India...

. 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

William Thomas Blanford

William Thomas Blanford 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...

 wrote to him that

"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

Thomas C. Jerdon

Thomas Caverhill Jerdon was a British physician, zoologist and botanist. He is best remembered for his pioneering works on the ornithology of India...

 to the journal Nature, however this was not published for want of space. http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?type=article&did=HISTSCITECH.0012.0263.0011&isize=text

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.

Family

On 15 January 1839, he married Maria Dorothea Hunter Blair (c.1816–1890) in Malta. They had six children: His wife was the daughter of Sir David Hunter-Blair, 3rd Baronet.

• James Thomas Spencer Elliot (1845–1892)
• Walter Blair Elliot (1847–1869)
• Caroline Elliot (1852–post 1887)
• Edward
  Edward Hay Mackenzie Elliot
  Major Edward Hay Mackenzie Elliot was a British soldier who served as Private Secretary to His Excellency David Boyle, 7th Earl of Glasgow while he was Governor of New Zealand in the 1890s...
  
   (1852–1920), who played football for Scotland in the unofficial international matches
  England v Scotland representative matches (1870–1872)
  Between 1870 and 1872, the Football Association organised five representative association football matches between teams from England and Scotland, all held in London. The first of these matches was held at The Oval on 5 March 1870, and the fifth was on 21 February 1872. The matches, which were...
  
  in 1871 and 1872.
• Herman Elliot (1854–1895)
• Dorothea Helen Elliot (died 1925)

External links

• http://www.newstodaynet.com/19aug/ss3.htm
• Correspondence with Charles Darwin