He is often considered as among the first to detect bacteriophage activity and suggested that their presence in the waters of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers may have had a role in restricting the outbreaks of cholera.

Apart from his professional studies, he took considerable interest in the Islamic geometric patterns in Mughal architecture ("Saracenic art" in the language of his day) as well as the soaring flight of birds, culture and its impact on education.

[1] While on a beach at Dunwich in 1885, he saved a girl from drowning and the local newspapers hoped that he would be awarded a gallantry medal by the Royal Humane Society.

[5] As a bacteriologist he was associated with several others like Emanuel Edward Klein (Charles Smart Roy also worked at the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution) who were involved in a major public debate on vivisection, Hankin was seen by some press reporters as a "vivisector" who had "escaped" to India.

[6] Arriving in India, Hankin worked on the frequent outbreaks of cholera, challenging the prevalent view that "miasmas" were responsible for them.

The discoverer in this case is Mr Hankin an old antagonist of ours, whom we met in debate at Cambridge before he took ship and departed to serve as a bacteriologist in India, where he still remains.

[13] One of Hankin's duties as a chemical examiner was to attend to court cases that required the analysis of scientific forensic evidence.

[16] In 1895 the press noted that Hankin had been overzealous with his experimentation and had infected himself with cholera by drinking water that he thought had been treated using potassium permanganate.

Really, in some respects the British remain barbarians to the present day, and he should write an article on the mental ability of the Indian Powers-that-Be !

[28] With D. M. S. Watson, at the time a lecturer in vertebrate palaeontology at University College London, he also published a pioneering paper on the flight of pterodactyls in the Aeronautical Journal (1914).

[30][31][32][33] During the thirty years that he spent in India, Hankin took interest not just in tropical diseases but also the effects of opium and the action of cobra venom, working sometimes in collaboration with Albert Calmette and Waldemar Haffkine.

Outside of his health related research he took an interest in such diverse topics as the fauna inhabiting the dome of the Taj Mahal, insect camouflage and its military application,[34] native folklore and art.

He wrote that it came in the way of scientific research and that the legal measures should only be aimed to control cruelty imposed by traditional Indian practices noting that "so far as Englishmen of science are concerned the prevention of wanton or unnecessary cruelty to animals might safely be left to their good taste and good feeling.

[36] His main findings only found publication from 1925, after his return to the UK, when "The Drawing of Geometric Patterns in Saracenic Art" finally appeared in Memoirs of the Archaeological Survey of India, under the editorship of J. F.

[a][41][42][43] Hankin returned to England in the early 1920s, living for a while in the Norfolk Broads and spending winters at Torquay or Newquay before finally moving to Brighton.

Together with his old pathologist colleagues include Professor Roy, he built a prototype raft he dubbed The Bacillus, made of kerosene tins and metal rods with an "umbrella sail" based on an idea from Percy Pilcher.

[46] He attributed this to the superior mental ability that came out of enhancing intuition rather than the development of conscious reasoning that certain educational systems imposed.

[47] In 1920, he published a book on the subject The Mental Limitations of the Expert in which he considered examples where intuition was correct, despite failing rational explanation.

[48] He expanded on this work which was published with a foreword by C. S. Myers, co-founder of the British Psychological Society, and titled it Common Sense and its Cultivation (1926).