Francis Day

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Francis Day

Francis Talbot Day , CIE (born March 2, 1829 in Maresfield , East Sussex , † July 10, 1889 in Cheltenham ) was a British ichthyologist ( ichthyologist ). He dealt mainly with the fish of British India , where he spent several years as a military surgeon. He was a member of the Linnean Society and the Zoological Society of London .

Life

Francis Day was born in Maresfield, the third of seven children in a wealthy family in Sussex nearly 2,000  acres (about 8  square kilometers ) owned land. He attended Shrewsbury School before he devoted himself to studying medicine at St. George's Hospital in London from September 1848 . He completed his training there in 1851 with the MRCS ( Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons ), a diploma in surgery , and shortly afterwards joined the military, which shipped him to British India in 1852 as an assistant surgeon (Assistant Surgeon) . There he fought briefly in the Second Anglo-Burmese War and in the following years changed the regiment and the location of his station several times , while he was busy with the birds of India. This led to his admission to the Linnean Society of London in 1857, when he briefly returned to Britain on sick leave .

During his second stay in India from 1858 to 1864, Day devoted himself to ichthyology for the first time and collected, described and drew the fish in the region around Kochi in this context . When he returned to his homeland in 1864, he processed his previously returned notes into his first specialist article, "The Fishes of Cochin" , which was published in the Proceedings (now Journal of Zoology ) of the Zoological Society of London . In it, Day described 211 species of fish . When his sick leave was extended by a year, he decided to bundle his findings in a book so that "The Fishes of Maldabar" was published in 1865. He was also admitted to the Zoological Society of London during this period.

With the beginning of his third stay in India in 1866 Day made the first attempts to settle trout in the Nilgiri Mountains , which he succeeded after a few failures and for which he was honored with the silver medal of the French Société d'acclimatation ( Acclimatization Society ) in 1872 . In 1867 he was appointed Professor of Materia Medica and for the first time released from military service for his research work - up to this point he had accomplished all his scientific achievements parallel to his work as a military surgeon, also doing research in the field of medicine and, for example , writing articles on cholera . As a result, he increasingly concentrated on his research and traveled to different regions of India and Burma to study their fish stocks. In 1869 he was accepted into the Royal Asiatic Society and in 1871 appointed Inspector-General of Fisheries .

Between May 1873 and May 1874 Day spent the last year in India before he returned to his homeland and from then on worked on his main work, "The Fishes of India" , which was published in four parts . He also spent the year 1875 on research trips within Europe, including to Berlin , Paris , The Hague and Leiden . In 1885 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Indian Empire before he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1888 . He was also the holder of the Order of the Crown of Italy and an honorary member of the German Fisheries Association .

Throughout his scientific career, Day faced constant criticism from Albert Günther , director of the zoological department at the Natural History Museum in London. As a result, Days' collections of fish and birds were spread across many museums (up to the Australian Museum , for example ), while the Natural History Museum, as a supposedly obvious recipient, only received a few specimens.

In total, he published over 70 scientific articles and described over 300 species.

Francis Day died on July 10, 1889 in Cheltenham on a cancer .

Private

Francis Day was married twice (1857–1869 and 1872–1873) and each widowed. With his first wife he had a son (* 1864) and a daughter (* 1867).

Web links

Commons : Francis Day  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Whitehead & Talwar, pp. 21-22.
  2. ^ Whitehead & Talwar, p. 23.
  3. ↑ a b c Whitehead & Talwar, pp. 18-19.
  4. ^ Whitehead & Talwar, p. 59.
  5. ^ Whitehead & Talwar, pp. 59 ff.
  6. ^ Whitehead & Talwar, p. 107.
personal data
SURNAME Day, Francis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Day, Francis Talbot (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British ichthyologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1829
PLACE OF BIRTH Maresfield , UK
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 1889
Place of death Cheltenham , UK