John Keast Lord

John Keast Lord (1818–1872) was an English veterinarian and traveller, known as a naturalist, journalist and author.

He was probably the son of Edward Lord, and was born in Cornwall. He was brought to , Devon, with his brother, William Barry Lord, and educated by an uncle named Luscombe. Lord was apprenticed to Messrs. Edgecombe & Stannes, chemists in Tavistock, and then entered the Royal Veterinary College, London, 4 November 1842; and received his diploma 29 May 1844. He established himself as a veterinary surgeon at Tavistock; but he began to drink, and he suddenly disappeared.

Lordis said to have made a whaling voyage and been shipwrecked, and to have been for some years a trapper in Minnesota and the Hudson Bay fur countries. On 19 June 1855, during the Crimean War, he was appointed to the British Army in the East as a veterinary surgeon with local rank, and attached to the artillery of the Turkish forces, with which he served in the Crimea. He received the rank of lieutenant 4 January 1856. In August 1856 he was acting as veterinary surgeon with local rank and senior lieutenant of the Osmanli horse artillery.

When British Columbia was formed into a colony, after the gold discoveries on the Fraser River in western Canada in 1858, Lord was appointed naturalist to the commission which was sent out to run a boundary line along the 49th parallel north of latitude, separating the new colony from United States territory. He was for some time resident on Vancouver Island; the collection (mammals, birds, fishes, insects, and other) made by him went to the British Museum (South Kensington). Two claimed new mammals, Fiber osoyooensis and Lagomys minimus (i.e. American pika), were described by him in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, 1863. In the same year he delivered lectures in the garb of a trapper on The Canoe, the Rifle, and the Axe, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London; and there he became acquainted with Francis Trevelyan Buckland. At Buckland's suggestion he became a contributor to the The Field, and joined the staff of Land and Water on its establishment 1 January 1866.

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