Cunningham, Robert Oliver

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