He laboured to make archaeology an integral part of university education, and with that end in view collected objects of art and antiquity for the museum of his college.
His special study was the survival of Roman antiquities in various parts of Europe, and his inquiries took him during the summer recesses to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, and Turkey.
His discoveries of Roman antiquities, which shed much new light on the interpretation of Latin literature, were embodied in papers contributed between 1875 and 1907 to The Archaeological Journal.
John Whitley, D.D., chancellor of Killaloe; he married in 1871 Louise Emily (died 1882), daughter of Admiral Bowes-Watson of Cambridge.
[1] Besides his archaeological papers and contributions to the second (revised) edition of William Smith's Latin Dictionary, he published A Letter to J. Robson, Esq., on the Slade Professorships of Fine Art (1869), and Remarks on Ivory Cabinets in the Possession of Wickham Flowor, Esq., (1871).