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Francis Day


Francis Day CIE (2 March 1829 – 10 July 1889) was an army surgeon and naturalist in the Madras Presidency who later became the Inspector-General of Fisheries in India and Burma. A pioneer ichthyologist, he described more than three hundred fishes in the two volume work on The Fishes of India. He also wrote the fish volumes of the Fauna of British India series. He was also responsible for the introduction of trout into the Nilgiri hills, for which he received a medal from the French Societe d'Acclimatation. Many of his fish specimens are distributed across museums with only a small fraction deposited in the British Museum (Natural History Museum, London), an anomaly caused by a prolonged conflict with Albert Günther, the keeper of zoology there.

Day was born in Maresfield, East Sussex, the third son of William and Ann Elliott née Le Blanc. The family estate included two thousand acres with forty tenant farmers during his childhood. William Day was interest in geology, an interest he had inherited from his father, also a William Day who was draper in London who later took to studying and painting minerals and rocks. One of Francis' older brothers took an interest in geology and worked along with Adam Sedgwick. Francis studied at Shrewsbury School under a Dr Kennedy. Taking an interest in medicine, he joined St. George's Hospital in 1849 where he studied under Henry Day, with Francis Trevelyan Buckland as a classmate. He received the MRCS in 1851 and joined as Assistant Surgeon in the Madras Army, British East India Company, in 1852. Service in India took him to Mercara, Bangalore, and Hyderabad and through this period took an interest in natural history.


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