Background
He was born in India of Irish parents, who returned and settled at Kilmanock in County Wexford when the boy was three years old.
He was born in India of Irish parents, who returned and settled at Kilmanock in County Wexford when the boy was three years old.
He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, spending summer holidays botanizing at home under the encouragement of A. G. More.
He took a commission in the 5th Irish Rifles, in which he served in the Anglo-Boer War between 1901-1902. He later worked in the Natural History Museum, London, and worked on various Government investigations. They had six children.
In his work as a natural historian, he described a great number of new species of small mammal on the islands around the British Isles, notably the house mice and field mice of Saint Kilda which he called Music muralis and Music hirtensis, believing that these had evolved in situ having colonised the islands naturally via land or ice-bridges.
Although this has been demonstrated to be wrong, and many of his described species are now regarded as island forms rather than species in their own right, his contribution to natural history was enormous. He was a valued contributor to the Irish Naturalist journal.
His papers and correspondence are held at the University of Manitoba. He died on 17 January 1914 of pneumonia following a heart attack on South Georgia Island in the South Antarctic whilst leading a British Government investigation into the whale and seal fisheries there.