Background
He was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Thomas Anderson who worked in the National Bank of Scotland and his wife Jane Cleghorn.
anatomist curator explorer naturalist university professor Zoologist
He was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Thomas Anderson who worked in the National Bank of Scotland and his wife Jane Cleghorn.
He left to study medicine and graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1861. He studied anatomy under John Goodsir and became an Doctor of Medicine in 1862 with a gold medal for his thesis in zoology. During this period he studied marine organisms based on dredging off the coast of Scotland and published notes in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History.
He went to school at George Square Academy and Hill Street Institution before joining work at the Bank of Scotland. He was also associated with the founding of the Royal Physical Society which grew out of the Wernerian Society over which he presided. He was appointed to the chair of natural history in the Free Church college in Edinburgh and worked for the next two years.
Anderson moved to in 1864 to took up the position as the first curator of the n Museum at Calcutta in 1865.
He catalogued the mammal and archaeological collections. He held the position of curator until 1887, when he was succeeded by James Wood-Mason and made superintendent of the museum.
He made several collection expeditions to China and Burma. In 1867 he accompanied Colonel Edward Bosc Sladen as a naturalist on an expedition to Upper Burma and Yunnan.
This expedition allowed him to collect the Irrawaddy dolphin, Orcaella brevirostris and compared with Orcaella fluminalis and the Gangetic dolphin, Plantanista gangetica.
In 1875-1876 he travelled to the same area under Colonel Horace Browne. This was cut short due to the murder of the consular officer Augustus Raymond Margary. Anderson made a third expedition for the n Museum in 1881-1882 to the Mergui archipelago, Burma.
Anderson made comparative studies of anatomy of the species that he collected.
He worked on reptiles, birds as well as mammals such as of the genus Hylomys. He also wrote on the ethnology of the Selungs of the Mergui archipelago.
Many of the plant specimens that he collected are at Calcutta, Kew and the Natural History Museum, London. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1879 and was made honorary Doctor of Laws of Edinburgh in 1885.
During the time that he held the office of superintendent of the Calcutta museum he also served as professor of comparative anatomy at the medical school in Calcutta.
He later made extensive zoological collections in Egypt, forming the basis of his Zoology of Egypt. They are buried together on the south side of Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh. The portrait head was sculpted by David Watson Stevenson.
Species named after him include Sacculina andersoni Giard, 1887, a parasitic barnacle.
Royal Society; Royal Society of Edinburgh.