Natural History
At a young age he had been interested in birds and had made a small collection of British birds, nests and eggs. He corresponded with Henry Stevenson and one of his first publications was in 1858, the year in which Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their paper on natural selection. Swinhoe took to the ideas of Darwin and in 1872 he named a species (now a subspecies) after Darwin (Pucrasia macrolopha darwini). He was a regular published in The Ibis after 1860 and later to the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.
During his travels he studied the birds and mammals apart from studying the local culture. He collected both live animals and specimens on his travels and regularly sent them to the London Zoo. The first Pere David's Deer in Europe came from him.
His primary interest was however in birds and on these he corresponded extensively with Edward Blyth. Around 1871 he started suffering from partial paralysis and he moved to the Chefoo which he called the Scarborough of China. He was forced by his ill health to leave China in October 1875. From his home in Chelsea he continued to publish notes and his last publication in the Ibis was the description of a new genus and species of bird Liocichla steerii. He died at the age of 41, presumably of syphilis.
P. L. Sclater described him as one of the most industrious and successful exploring naturalists that have ever lived and after his death, A. R. Wallace wrote due to Mr. Swinhoe's own exertions...there is probably no part of the world (if we except Europe, North America, and British India) of whose warm-blooded vertebrates we possess fuller or more accurate knowledge than we do of the coast districts of China and its islands.
His collection of 3700 specimens was bought by Henry Seebohm and this was subsequently bequeathed to the Liverpool Museum. A number of species were named after Swinhoe, including Swinhoe's Storm-petrel, which he first described himself in 1867, and the Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoeii), a specimen of which John Edward Gray received from Swinhoe in 1873.
One of Robert's brother, Colonel Charles Swinhoe was a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society in India and an expert on lepidoptera.
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