The New International Encyclopædia/Falconer, Hugh

​FALCONER, Hugh (1808-65). A Scottish botanist and paleontologist, born at Forres (Elginshire). He graduated at the University of Aberdeen in 1820, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1828-29, was appointed assistant surgeon in the service of the East India Company in 1829, and in 1832 became superintendent of the botanic garden at Saharanpur (Northwestern Provinces), India. His investigations led to the discovery in the Siválik Hills of large numbers of important vertebrate fossils. For his work in connection with these remains he obtained the Wollaston medal of the Geological Society of London in 1837. It was on his recommendation, in a report to the Government of Bengal, that the culture of the tea-plant was introduced into India. He also discovered the asafœtida plant, and was the first to give a description of it. During his residence in England on sick leave in 1843-47 he prepared the India fossils of the British Museum for exhibition. In 1847 he received appointment as superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, and professor of botany in the medical college there. Me was elected foreign secretary of the Geological Society, and a vice-president of the Royal Society. He edited a large incomplete work entitled Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis (1846-49; nine parts with illustrations of 1123 specimens, and one volume of text), and published a Descriptive Catalogue of the Fossil Remains from the Sewalik Hills (1859). Considerable unpublished material was edited by C. Murchison as Palæontological Memoirs and Notes of the Late Hugh Falconer (London, 1868). Consult the biographical notice in the first volume of that work, and the Royal Society's Catalogue of Scientific Papers, vol. ii. (London, 1868).