Robert Oliver Cunningham was a Scottish naturalist. In January 1866 he was appointed Professor of Natural History in the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, but resigned in June in consequence of being appointed by the Admiralty upon the recommendation of Joseph Dalton Hooker, to collect plants as naturalist on board HMS Nassau. His natural history notes and narrative of the voyage was published in 1871 as The Natural History of the Straits of Magellan. In all, Cunningham published 18 scientific papers before 1872, his first which was about gannets was his theses but the others were mainly on his observations from the voyage of the Nassau. He presented some of these papers to the Zoological Society of London and to the Linnean Society. In 1871 Cunninham was appointed Professor of Natural History at Queens College, Belfast where he spent the following 31 years as a university teacher
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and botanist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's conception of gradual geological change, and the publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author. In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms (1881), he examined earthworms and their effect on soil
Naturalist
Christian Anton Goering was a German naturalist, painter and graphic artist who spent several years in Venezuela. He learned taxidermy from his father, who was a member of several ornithological societies. It was at a meeting of one of these societies that he met Christian Ludwig Brehm who helped him obtain a position at the Ornithological Museum of the University of Halle, where he worked under the direction of Hermann Burmeister. From 1856 to 1858, they travelled in South America and he decided to pursue his interests in natural history. He also went to London, where he took lessons from the zoological artist Joseph Wolf. While he was there, the Secretary of the Zoological Society, Philip Lutley Sclater, asked him to go to Venezuela to collect specimens for the British Museum
Naturalist and author of Deep-sea Fishing and Fishing Boats
William Henry Hudson (known in Argentina as Guillermo Enrique Hudson) was an Anglo-Argentine author, naturalist and ornithologist. Hudson spent his youth studying the local flora and fauna in Argentina while publishing his ornithological work in the Proceedings of the Royal Zoological Society. He produced a series of ornithological studies, including Argentine Ornithology (1888-1899) and British Birds (1895)
Sir Frederick John Jackson was an English administrator, explorer and ornithologist. Jackson joined the British Ornithologists' Union in 1888. That year a paper by Jackson and Captain Shelley was published describing birds collected during his 1884-1886 trip to Africa. He collected many specimens in an 1898-1891 expedition to Uganda, and descriptions of this collection were published in a five-part paper in the Ibis in 1891-1892. Other papers described new species appeared in the Ibis and other journals between 1890 and 1917. Jackson was elected President of the East Africa and Uganda Natural History Society in 1910. He wrote nine of the nineteen chapters of Big Game Shooting, published in 1894. After retiring he worked on a complete history of the Birds of East Africa and Uganda, which was unpublished when he died in 1929, following pneumonia. The Birds of Kenya Colony and the Uganda Protectorate was completed by William Lutley Sclater
Henry Lee was an English naturalist. He succeeded John Keast Lord as naturalist of the Brighton Aquarium in 1872, and was for a time a director. At the aquarium he instituted experiments on the migration of smelts, the habits of the herring, whitebait, crayfish, and other topics. Lee was an amateur collector of natural history specimens and microscopist. He was a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Geological Society and Zoological Society of London. He was president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1875-1877. Lee was sceptical of the claims of cryptozoology and sea serpents. His book Sea Monsters Unmasked (1884) compared sightings of the Kraken to the squid
Major-General George Frederick Leycester Marshall became a Colonel in the Indian Army and was a naturalist interested in the birds and butterflies of India. Marshall described several new species of butterflies, along with Lionel de Nicéville, and discovered the white-tailed iora, sometimes referred to as Marshall's ilora. He wrote The Butterflies of India, Burmah and Ceylon
Andrew Dickson Murrary was a Scottish lawyer, botanist, zoologist and entomologist. Murray studied insects which caused crop damage, specialising in coleoptera. In botany, he specialised in Coniferae. He served as president of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh during 1858-59. Murray was a prominent opponent of the Darwin-Wallace model of natural selection. Murray believed that hybridisation was a better explanation for mimicry than natural selection. In 1860, Murray reviewed Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh