The Marquess of Tweeddale, P.Z.S.

Abstract

IT is with extreme regret that we have to chronicle the death, after a three days' attack of bronchitis, on the morning of December 29, of Arthur Hay, ninth Marquess of Tweeddale, F.R.S., and President of the Zoological Society of London. Born in 1824, the second son of Field-Marshal the late Lord Tweeddale, K.T., a veteran of the Peninsula and other campaigns of “the Great War,” Lord Arthur Hay at an early age entered the army, as befitted the godchild of the grand English captain, and obtained a commission in the Grenadier Guards. But the ordinary guardsman's life in times oi peace was inadequate to his aspirations, and reaching the rank of captain, he was soon after appointed aide-de-camp to Sir Henry (afterwards Lord) Hardinge, then Governor-General of India, and in that capacity accompanied his chief through the ever-memorable campaign of the Sutlej. After the English arms had triumphed in the conquest of the Punjab, Lord Arthur was attached to a mission, the details of which, we believe, have never been made public, to some of the tribes bordering upon our northern frontier, and in discharge of that duty reached places unvisited by any European traveller since the days of Moorcroft. Lord Arthur's services in India and the adjacent countries lasted over several years, in the course of which time his attention was attracted by their rich and little-known fauna, and he not only formed the acquaintance, but assiduously cultivated the friendship of two of the greatest Indian zoologists of the time—Jerdon and Blyth—of whom he became an apt pupil, fishes and birds being particularly the objects of his pursuit. Returning home at length he resumed his regimental duties, and on the outbreak of the Russian war, in 1854, he accompanied the expeditionary force first to Turkey and thence to the Crimea, taking part in the operations which ended in the fall of Sebastopol. Soon after the conclusion of peace he left the army, and his old zoological tastes, which had been growing slack, returned to him more strongly than ever. On the death of his eldest brother, Lord Gifford, he became heir to his father's honours and estates, and assumed the courtesy title of Lord Walden, by which, perhaps, he will be most generally recognised, for under that designation he published the greater part of his contributions to zoology, and under it he succeeded the late Sir George Clerk as President of the Zoological Society, performing the duties of that office with a singular amount of dignity and urbanity. For several years he continued to live in a cottage he had built for himself at Chislehurst, and there he began to form an ornithological library and collection on a scale almost unattempted hitherto in this country, though the collection was supposed to be limited to Indian, or at least Asiatic, specimens. On the death of his father, at a very advanced age, in 1876, Lord Walden inherited the Scottish peerage and estates, and thenceforth his home was mainly the old ancestral seat of Yester, near Haddington, where he entered, with the energy natural to his character, upon the life of an agriculturist; in this respect following the example of his father, who had long since turned his sword into a ploughshare, and had earned the reputation of being one of the most scientific farmers in that part of North Britain, which is the headquarters of scientific farming.