William Thomas Blanford

William Thomas Blanford ( born October 7, 1832 in London, † June 23, 1905 ) was an English geologist, zoologist and naturalist.

Life and work

Blanford was first formed in private schools in Brighton and 1846-1848 commercial in Paris. After that he went to Italy for two years and worked in a trading house in Civitavecchia. However, after his return to England he joined in 1851 in the newly established Royal School of Mines (now Imperial College ) that his younger brother Henry F. Blanford, later head of the Meteorological Bureau of India, already visited. During his training he spent a year at the Mining Academy in Freiberg. 1854 his education was completed. At the same time with his brother, he entered the service of the Geological Survey for India in the same year.

Initially, William Thomas Blanford focused primarily coal and worked in Raniganj mining district near Bombay. In the vicinity of another coal field in Talchir he discovered boulders that had been moved from the ice. With this came the first evidence of ice-age glaciation in the equatorial region. 1862-1866 Blanford was involved in a comprehensive geological survey of the region around Bombay.

In addition to the geology was also the zoology of his employment fields, especially the research on land snails, and secondarily also on birds and mammals. Even with plants and fossils he studied. In 1866 Blanford part in a military expedition to Magdala in Ethiopia. In 1870 he published his Observations on the Geology and Zoology of Abyssinia and in the same year took part in a Himalayan Expedition to Sikkim. 1871 to 1872 he was a member of the Commission to draw the line between Persia and India. During these activities he has been proven to natural history research on these countries.

In 1872 he returned to London in 1874 to relocate to other research projects to Calcutta. Until 1877 he mainly dealt with the geology of the desert Are.

After his retirement in 1882 Blanford returned to England, where he participated until shortly before his death as an editor at the publishing project Fauna of British India. In 1879 he published with Henry Benedict Medlicott the Manual of the Geology of India.

For his services as a geologist Blanford received in 1883 the Wollaston Medal of the Geological Society of London, he chaired from 1888 to 1890 and its treasurer office he held from 1895 to 1905. Already in 1874 he had been elected to the Royal Society and in 1904 as Companion in the Order of the Indian Empire. In 1901 he was awarded for his work on the geographical distribution of animals with the Royal Medal of the Royal Society.

Works

  • Mollusca: Testacellidae and Zonitidae, Taylor & Francis, London 1908
  • The distribution of vertebrate animals in India, Ceylon, and Burma. Published for the Royal Society by Dulau and Co., London 1901
  • The fauna of British India, including Ceylon and Burma. Mammalia, Taylor and Francis, London 1888-1891
  • Observations on the geology and zoology of Abyssinia, made falling on the progress of the British expedition to country did in 1867-68. Macmillan and Co., London 1870
  • Eastern Persia - An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Border Commission 1870-71-72; Volume I: The Geography, 1876; Reprint Elibron Classics, 2000 ISBN 978-1-4021-8340-9, Volume II The Zoology and Geology, 1876; Reprint, 2000
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