Research
While in India he maintained a diary with notes on a range of subjects. He also wrote to the journals of scholarly societies. In 1859 he published Flora Andhrica, or plants of the Northern Circars which included the names of plants in Telugu and English. In 1840 he wrote on the ‘cromlechs and cairns’ in the Nilgiri hills. He excavated and collected the Amaravathi Marbles now in the British Museum and studied ancient inscriptions, beliefs and cultures. He was a keen numismatist and collector of coins and his main work on the topic was published in 1885, at a time when unable to see, he had to feel the coins to describe them and have written by a scribe for his Coins of Southern India.
He took an interest in the local zoology and spent considerable time outdoors in his early years in India. He was in correspondence with Charles Darwin and at his request he sent him skins of various domestic birds from India and Burma in 1856. He also collaborated with naturalists in India like Thomas C. Jerdon. He collected specimens molluscs, beached whales and dolphins and a range of other species which were examined by experts in England like Richard Owen. He catalogued the mammals of southern India in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science and described several new species of small mammals including the rat species Golunda ellioti and the Madras Tree-Shrew Anathana ellioti that are named after him. W. T. Blanford wrote to him "ery little work is now done on mammals in India. Everybody has gone into ornithology. So far as I am aware your paper in the Madras journal is the only good account.."
Sir Walter Elliot home in Randals Road, Vepery, Madras was a focal point for many oriental scholars in the region. He encouraged many other oriental researchers including Ferdinand Kittel and Robert Caldwell. Back in England his home was a veritable museum and he was active until the day of his death. On 1st March 1887 he dictated and signed a letter to George Pope, expressing his enthusiasm for a new edition of Pope's translation of the Tamil Kural. He died the same evening.
Read more about this topic: Walter Elliot (Scottish Naturalist)
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