Anderson, John (1833-1900)

Anderson, John

ZOOLOGIST, ANATOMIST (SCOTLAND)

BORN 4 Oct 1833, Edinburgh - DIED 15 Aug 1900, Buxton, Derbyshire
GRAVE LOCATION Edinburgh: Dean Cemetery, Dean Path

John Anderson was the son of Thomas Anderson, who was employed by the National Bank of Scotland. His mother was Jane Cleghorn. Like his brother Thomas (1832-1870), who became a botanist, he was interested in natural history. For a while he worked at the Bank of Scotland like his father, but he left to study medicine at Edinburh University. There John Goodsir was his anatomy teacher. He received his MD 1862 and won the gold medal for his thesis on zoology. Not much later Anderson obtained the chair of natural history in the Free Church College in Edinburgh, succeeding Sir John Fleming (1785-1857). But in 1864 he moved to India where in 1865 he became the first curator of the Indian Museum at Calcutta.

He travelled several times to China and Birma and he catalogued the collections of the museum. In 1879 he was elected into the Royal Society. He had married Grace Scott Thomas and a few years later, in 1886, he resigned from his post af the museum and was succeeded by James Wood-Mason (1846-1893). He left India and returned to London. There he was acttive for the Zoological Society of London. He died in Brixton, Derbyshire in 1900. He was buried in his native Edinburgh. The portrait head on his grave in Dean Cemetery was sculpted by David Watson Stevenson.

Related persons
• was pupil of Goodsir, John

Images

The grave of John Anderson at Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.
Picture by Androom (05 Nov 2019)