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Sir William Jardine, 7th Baronet of Applegarth was a Scottish naturalist. He is known for his editing of a long series of natural history books, The Naturalist's Library.

Jardine was born in 1800 in Edinburgh, the son of Sir Alexander Jardine, 6th baronet of Applegarth and his wife, Jane Maule. He was educated in both York and Edinburgh, then studied medicine at Edinburgh University. Aged 25, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He was a co-founder of the Berwickshire Naturalists' Club, and contributed to the founding of the Ray Society. While ornithology was his main passion, he also studies ichthyology, botany and geology. His book on fossil burrows and traces, the Ichnology of Annandale, included fossils from his ancestral estate. He was the first to coin the term ichnology, and this was the first book written on the subject. His private natural history museum and library are said to have been the finest in Britain.

Jardine made natural history available to all levels of Victorian society by editing the forty volumes of The Naturalist's Library, issued and published by his brother in law, the Edinburgh printer and engraver, William Home Lizars. His other publications included an edition of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne, Illustrations of Ornithology and an edition of Alexander Wilson's Birds of America.

Jardine described a number of bird species, alone or in conjunction with his friend Prideaux John Selby.

He died in 1874 in Sandown, Isle of Wight.

Henry Piddington was an English sea captain who sailed in East India and China and later settled in Bengal where he worked as a curator of a geological museum and worked on scientific problems, and is well known for his pioneering studies in meteorology of tropical storms and hurricanes. He noted the circular winds around a calm centre recorded by ships caught in storms and coined the name cyclone in 1848.

The Asiatic Society is a Government of India organisation founded during the Company rule in India to enhance and further the cause of 'Oriental research' (in this case, research into India and the surrounding regions). It was founded by the philologist William Jones in 1784 in a meeting presided over by Justice Robert Chambers in Calcutta, the then-capital of the Presidency of Fort William.

Edward Gerrard, founder of the London taxidermy firm Edward Gerrard & Sons, was an employee of the British Museum's zoological department, as an attendant.

Employed by the British Museum

The Royal College of Surgeons is an ancient college established in England to regulate the activity of surgeons. Derivative organisations survive in many present and former members of the Commonwealth. These organisations are now also responsible for training surgeons and setting their examinations.

The East India Company was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia), and later with East Asia. The company seized control of large parts of the Indian subcontinent and colonised part of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. At its peak, the company was the largest corporation in the world. The EIC had its own armed forces in the form of the company's three Presidency armies, totalling about 260,000 soldiers, twice the size of the British army at the time.

Originally chartered as the 'Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies', the company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid-1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo, dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea and opium. The company also rules the beginnings of the British Empire in India.

The company eventually came to rule large areas of India, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858. Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control on India in the form of the new British Raj.

The company subsequently experiences recurring problems with its finances, despite frequent government intervention. It was dissolved in 1874 under the terms of the East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act enacted one year earlier, as the Government of India Act had by then rendered it vestigial, powerless and obsolete. The official government machinery of the British Raj had assumed its governmental functions and absorbed its armies.