Edgar Albert Smith


Edgar Albert Smith was a British zoologist, a malacologist.
His father was Frederick Smith, a well-known entomologist, and Assistant Keeper of Zoology in the British Museum, Bloomsbury. Edgar Albert Smith was educated both at the North London Collegiate School and privately, being well grounded in Latin amongst other subjects, as his excellent diagnoses bear witness.
Smith married in July 1876. Subsequently, he and his wife had four sons and two daughters.
He gave more prominent attention to the fauna of the African Great Lakes and the marine molluscs of South Africa, and also the non-marine mollusk fauna of Borneo and New Guinea.

In the British Museum

Smith was employed at the British Museum as an Assistant Keeper of the Zoological Department for more than forty years, from 1867 to 1913. Edgar Smith's first work was in connection with the celebrated collection of shells made by Hugh Cuming and acquired by the Museum in 1846, at which he worked under Dr. John Edward Gray. From 1871 he was in immediate charge of the collection of molluscs, whilst till 1878 he was also responsible for the rest of the marine invertebrates with the exception of the Crustacea. On the removal of the natural history collections from Bloomsbury to South Kensington, the arrangement of the Molluscan Collection in the then new Natural History Museum was, of course, his peculiar care and was planned by him with a special eye to the convenience of the numerous students and amateur collectors who have not been slow to avail themselves of it. In 1895 Edgar Smith obtained his well-deserved promotion to the post of Assistant Keeper in the Zoological Department.

Expeditions

Smith studied molluscs brought back by various expeditions like those to Antarctic of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which had lain by untouched, were dealt with by him in 1875. The Arctic specimens, collected on the polar voyage of and , were described in 1878. The results of the Transit of Venus Expedition to Kerguelen Islands and Rodrigues were set forth in the special volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1879. The accounts of shells procured during the voyages of Alert to the Straits of Magellan and the Indo-Pacific were published in 1881 and 1884.
The reports on the bivalves and Heteropoda brought home by the Challenger'' Expedition were the most noteworthy of this series, and appeared in 1885 and 1888 respectively.
Mention must also be made of his reports on the collections of molluscs of during Southern Cross Expedition published 1902, from Sokotra 1903, from the Maldives and Laccadives 1902 and 1903, from the National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–1904 in 1907, and finally the Expedition in the Antarctic of 1910 in published in 1915.

Awards and memberships

Smith became a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London in 1872. He became a member of the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1886 and he became president of the Conchological Society in 1890. He was also a corresponding member of the Linnaean Society of New South Wales, and of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, whilst he was also made an Honorary Member of the Midland Malacological Society, as well as of the Malacological Section of the Birmingham Natural History and Philosophical Society. He was a founding member of the Malacological Society of London, and was the president of the Malacological Society of London in 1901–1903. He was an editor of Proceedings of the Malacological Society of London in 1904–1916,and also at the time of his death. He served as a member of the British Association Committee which was appointed in 1890 to "Report on the present state of our knowledge of the Zoology of the Sandwich Islands", and which reported regularly from 1891 till 1912.
He received the Imperial Service Order in 1903 during the reign of Edward VII of the United Kingdom for his long and meritorious services to science.

From Africa

The molluscan faunas of the great African lakes also claimed his attention and formed the subject of a presidential address before the Malacological Society of London, in which no support was given to the views of Mr. John Edmund Sharrock Moore, who regarded the gastropods of Lake Tanganyika as representing forms which had their origin in marine Jurassic times. Smith have described 18 new taxa based on shells collected by explorer Joseph Thomson. His works about freshwater snails of Africa include number of papers; new taxa described by Smith follows:
1877
1880
1881
1890
1895
1899
1901
1903
1904
Mr. Smith had some slight connexion with geological work, as he was appealed to on more than one occasion to determine molluscan remains found in the post-Pliocene deposits of South Africa, when the majority of the species could be referred to recent forms. He was also joint author with Richard Bullen Newton of a paper:
1877
1907
1904
1907