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Ferdinand Stoliczka

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FERDINAND STOLICZKA (1838-1874), Austrian palaeontologist, was born at Hochwald, in Moravia, in May 1838. He was educated at Prague and at the university of Vienna where he graduated Ph.D. He was encouraged to work at geology and palaeontology by Professor E. Suess and Dr M. Hoernes; and as early as 1859 he communicated to the Vienna Academy a description of some freshwater mollusca from the Cretaceous rocks of the north-eastern Alps. In 1861 he joined the Austrian Geological Survey, and in the following year he was appointed palaeontologist to the Geological Survey of India. In Calcutta the description of the Cretaceous fossils of Southern India was placed in his hands, and the publication of this great work which formed part of the Palaeontologia indica, was commenced with the assistance of H. F. Blanford in 186 3 and completed in 1873. During the last ten years of his life he published geological memoirs on the western Himalayas and Tibet, and numerous papers on all branches of Indian zoology, from mammals to insects and corals. In. 1873 he was selected as naturalist and geologist to accompany a mission despatched by the Indian government to Yarkund and Kashgar under Mr (afterwards Sir Douglas) Forsyth. His health, which had been severely affected by his previous field work in' India, proved unequal to the strain, and he died on the 19th of June 1874, at Shayok, in Ladak, while "returning loaded with the spoils and notes of nearly a year's research in one of the least-known parts of Central Asia." Memoir (with bibliography) by V. Ball, appended to Scientific Results of the second Yarkand Mission, 1886; Obituary by W. T. Blanford, Nature, July 9, 1814.