Edward Hamilton Aitken

In May 1903, he was appointed Chief Collector of Customs and Salt Revenue at Karachi, and in November 1905, was made Superintendent in charge of the District Gazetteer of Sind.

Their daughter - Jesse Helen, married James Hood Wilson Lownie (1887-1961), and their son Ralph became a colonial judge and author of Auld Reekie.

The boy who was the most ardent of bug-hunters, or the most enthusiastic of bird-nesters in England, where one shilling will buy nearly all that is known, or can be known, about birds or butterflies, maintains in this country, aided by Messrs. B.

I am not speaking of Bombay people, with their clubs and gymkhanas and other devices for oiling the wheels of existence, but of the dreary up-country exile, whose life is a blank, a moral Sahara, a catechism of the Nihilist creed.

Any hobby will draw out the mind, but the one I plead for touches the soul too, keeps the milk of human kindness from souring, puts a gentle poetry into the prosiest life.

All rabbits are idiotic things, but these come in and sit up meekly and beg a crust of bread, and even a perennial fare of village moorgee cannot induce me to issue the order for their execution and conversion into pie.

For no one, I take it, who reflects for an instant will deny that a small mosquito, with black rings upon a white ground, or a sparrow that has finally made up its mind to rear a family in your ceiling, exercises an influence on your personal happiness far beyond the Czar of the Russias.

We might make head against the foe if we laid to heart the lesson our national history in India teaches—namely, that the way to fight uncivilised enemies is to encourage them to cut one another's throats, and then step in and inherit the spoil.

The 'poor dumb animals' can give each other a bit of their minds like their betters, and to me their fierce and tender little passions, their loves and hates, their envies and jealousies, and their small vanities beget a sense of fellow-feeling which makes their presence society.

There is a large grey ring-dove that sits in the blazing sun all through the hottest hours of the day, and says coo-coo, coo, coo-coo, coo until the melancholy sweet monotony of that sound is as thoroughly mixed up in my brain with 110° in the shade as physic in my infantile memories with the peppermint lozenges which used to 'put away the taste,' But as for these creatures, which confess the heat and come into the house and gasp, I feel drawn to them.

Not that all my midday guests are equally welcome: I could dispense, for instance, with the grey-ringed bee which has just reconnoitred my ear for the third time, and guesses it is a key-hole—she is away just now, but only, I fancy, for clay to stop it up with.

I seldom killed anything, while the hours I spent in stalking my game and watching for a chance of getting a fair shot taught me more about the personal habits of birds than I could have learned in any other way.

[4][5][6][7] He maintained an aquarium and made Sunday-morning expeditions to the ravines at the back of Malabar Hill to search for mosquito larvae to feed its inmates.

Mr. Aitken investigated the capabilities for the destruction of larvae, of a small surface-feeding fish with an ivory-white spot on the top of its head, which he had found at Vihar in the stream below the bund.

T. R. Bell, a naturalist friend, writing of him after his death said Eha once wrote: He whose ear is untaught to enjoy the harmonious discord of the birds, travels alone when he might have company.He kept many pets at home and Surgeon-General Bannerman noted in his preface to Eha's books that he often found himself having to go on unpleasant trips to the primeval forests of Cumballa Hill to look for mosquito larvae to feed the fish.

In appearance Eha has been described as a long, thin, erect, bearded man...with a typically Scots face lit up with the humorous twinkle one came to know so well.

would never have written ... Every one of Mr. Robinson's little tricks of manner have been faithfully and almost ludicrously copied: the smalle ingenious tags from classical poets, the quaint mixture of Solomon and Darwin, the funny little jumps from pure science to pure nonsense, nay, even the very phrases, like the "obscene saturnalia" of the frogs, or the "promise and potency" of the mosquito- all are reproduced in minute imitativenss by this all too faithful admirer".His books include After returning to Edinburgh, he wrote a series of articles on birdlife in the Strand Magazine.