Ernest Ayscoghe Floyer

Educated at Reverend C. Boys at Wing Rectory, Rutland, and then Charterhouse School from 1865 until 1869, he served for seven years in the Indian telegraph service, stationed on the coast of the Persian Gulf.

[1][2] On a long leave, in January 1876, Floyer started for the unexplored interior of what is now Sistan and Baluchestan province, in Iran.

He turned round the finances of the department, and induced the government to devote a part of its surplus to experiments on the cultivation of trees and plants in the desert.

He cultivated successfully cactus for fibre, Casuarina for telegraph poles, Hyoscyamus muticus yielding the alkaloid hyoscyamine, and other plants.

Having discovered sodium nitrate in a clay in Upper Egypt, he was appointed by the government to superintend the process of its extraction.

[1] In 1884 Floyer made a journey in the Sudan, from Wadi Halfa to Al Dabbah; and in 1887 surveyed two routes between the River Nile and the Red Sea at about latitude 26°.