FALCONER, HUGH (1808-1865), British palaeontologist and botanist, descended from an old Scottish family, was born at Forres on the 29th of February 1808. In 1826 he graduated at Aberdeen, where he manifested a taste for the study of natural history. He afterwards studied medicine in the university of Edinburgh, taking the degree of M.D. in 1829; during this period he zealously attended the botanical classes of Prof. R. Graham (1786-1845), and those on geology by Prof. R. Jameson. Proceeding to India in 1830 as assistant-surgeon on the Bengal establishment of the East India Company, he made on his arrival an examination of the fossil bones from Ava in the possession of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and his description of the collection, published soon afterwards, gave him a recognized position among the scientists of India. Early in 1831 he was appointed to the army station at Meerut, in the Northwestern Provinces, but in the same year he was asked to officiate as superintendent of the botanic garden of Saharanpur, during the ill-health and absence of Dr J.F. Royle; and in 1832 he succeeded to this post. He was thus placed in a district that proved to be rich in palaeontological remains; and he set to work to investigate its natural history and geology. In 1834 he published a geological description of the Siwalik hills, in the Tertiary strata of which he had in 1831 discovered bones of crocodiles, tortoises and other animals; and subsequently, with conjoint labourers, he brought to light a sub-tropical fossil fauna of unexampled extent and richness, including remains of Mastodon, the colossal ruminant Sivatherium, and the enormous tortoise Colossochelys Atlas. For these valuable discoveries he and Captain (afterwards Sir Proby T.) Cautley (1802-1871) received in 1837 the Wollaston medal in duplicate from the Geological Society of London. In 1834 Falconer was appointed to inquire into the fitness of India for the growth of the tea-plant, and it was on his recommendation that it was introduced into that country.
He was compelled by illness to leave India in 1842, and during his stay in England he occupied himself with the classification and arrangement of the Indian fossils presented to the British Museum and East India House, chiefly by himself and Sir Proby T. Cautley. He then set to work to edit the great memoir by Cautley and himself, entitled Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis, of which Part I. text was issued in 1846, and a series of 107 plates during the years 1846-1849. Unfortunately the work, owing partly to Dr Falconer’s absence from England and partly to ill-health, was never completed. He was elected F.R.S. in 1845. In 1847 he was appointed superintendent of the Calcutta botanical garden, and professor of botany in the medical college; and on entering on his duties in the following year he was at once employed by the Indian government and the Agricultural and Horticultural Society as their adviser on all matters connected with the vegetable products of India. He prepared an important report on the teak forests of Tenasserim, and this was the means of saving them from destruction by reckless felling; and through his recommendation the cultivation of the cinchona bark was introduced into the Indian empire. Being compelled by the state of his health to leave India in 1855, he spent the remainder of his life chiefly in examining fossil species in England and the Continent corresponding to those which he had discovered in India, notably the species of mastodon, elephant and rhinoceros; he also described some new mammalia from the Purbeck strata, and he reported on the bone-caves of Sicily, Gibraltar, Gower and Brixham. In the course of his researches he became interested in the question of the antiquity of the human race, and actually commenced a work on “Primeval Man,” which, however, he did not live to finish. He died on the 31st of January 1865. Shortly after his death a committee was formed for the promotion of a “Falconer Memorial.” This took the shape of a marble bust, which was placed in the rooms of the Royal Society of London, and of a Falconer scholarship of the annual value of £100, open for competition to graduates in science or medicine of the university of Edinburgh.
Dr Falconer’s botanical notes, with 450 coloured drawings of Kashmir and Indian plants, have been deposited in the library at Kew Gardens, and his Palaeontological Memoirs and Notes, comprising all his papers read before learned societies, have been edited, with a biographical sketch, by Charles Murchison, M.D. (London, 1868). Many reminiscences of Dr Falconer, and a portrait of him, were published by his niece, Grace, Lady Prestwich, in her Essays descriptive and biographical (1901).
FALCONER, WILLIAM (1732-1760), British poet, was born in Edinburgh on the 11th of February 1732. His father was a wig-maker, and carried on business in one of the small shops with wooden fronts at the Netherbow Port, an antique castellated structure which remained till 1764, dividing High Street from the Canongate. The old man became bankrupt, then tried business as a grocer, and finally died in extreme poverty. William, the son, having received a scanty education, was put to sea. He served on board a Leith merchant vessel, and in his eighteenth year obtained the appointment of second mate of the “Britannia,” a vessel employed in the Levant trade, and sailed from Alexandria for Venice. The “Britannia” was overtaken by a dreadful storm off Cape Colonna and was wrecked, only three of the crew being saved. Falconer was happily one of the three, and the incidents of the voyage and its disastrous termination formed the subject of his poem of The Shipwreck (1762). Meanwhile, on his return to England, Falconer, in his nineteenth year, printed at Edinburgh an elegy on Frederick, prince of Wales, and afterwards contributed short pieces to the Gentleman’s Magazine. Some of these descriptive and lyrical effusions possess merit. The fine naval song of “The Storm” (“Cease, rude Boreas”), reputed to be by George Alexander Stevens, the dramatic writer and lecturer, has been ascribed to Falconer, but apparently on no authority. The duke of York, to whom The Shipwreck had been dedicated, advised Falconer to enter the royal navy, and before the end of 1762 the poet-sailor was rated as a midshipman on board the “Royal George.” But as this ship was paid off at the peace of 1763, Falconer received an appointment as purser of the “Glory” frigate, a situation which he held until that vessel was laid up on ordinary at Chatham. In 1764 he published a new and enlarged edition of The Shipwreck, and in the same year a rhymed political tirade against John Wilkes and Charles Churchill, entitled The Demagogue. In 1769 appeared his Universal Marine Dictionary, in which retreat is defined as a French manœuvre, “not properly a term of the British marine.” While engaged on this dictionary, J. Murray, a bookseller in Fleet Street, father of Byron’s munificent publisher and correspondent, wished him to join him as a partner in business. The poet declined the offer, and became purser of the “Aurora” frigate, which had been commissioned to carry out to India certain supervisors or superintendents of the East India Company. Besides his nomination as purser, Falconer was promised the post of private secretary to the commissioners. Before sailing he published a third edition of his Shipwreck, which had again undergone “correction,” but not improvement. The poet sailed in the “Aurora” from Spithead on the 20th of September 1769. The vessel arrived safely at the Cape of Good Hope, and left on the 27th of December. She was never more heard of, having, as is supposed, foundered at sea. The Shipwreck, the poem with which Falconer’s name is connected, had a great reputation at one time, but the fine passages which pleased the earlier critics have not saved it from general oblivion.
See his Poetical Works in the “Aldine Edition” (1836), with a life by J. Mitford.
FALCONET, ÉTIENNE MAURICE (1716-1791), French sculptor, was born in Paris. His parents were poor, and he was at first apprenticed to a carpenter, but some of his clay-figures, with the making of which he occupied his leisure hours, attracted the notice of the sculptor Lemoine, who made him his pupil. He found time to study Greek and Latin, and also wrote several brochures on art. His artistic productions are characterized by the same defects as his writings, for though manifesting considerable cleverness and some power of imagination, they display in many cases a false and fantastic taste, the result, most probably, of an excessive striving after originality. One of his most successful statues was one of Milo of Crotona, which secured his admission to the membership of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1754. At the invitation of the empress Catherine he went in 1766 to St Petersburg, where he executed a colossal statue of Peter the Great in bronze. In 1788 he became director of the French Academy of Painting. Many of Falconet’s works, being placed in churches, were destroyed at the time of the French Revolution. His “Nymphe descendant au bain” is in the Louvre.
Among his writings are Reflexions sur la sculpture (Paris, 1768), and Observations sur la statue de Marc-Aurèle (Paris, 1771). The whole were collected under the title of Œuvres littéraires (6 vols., Lausanne, 1781-1782; 3 vols., Paris, 1787).