had described. In 1857 the plants which survived this neglect were deposited at Kew, and since Falconer's death his voluminous botanical notes, with 450 coloured drawings of Indian plants, have been placed in the Kew library. Besides working out his own collections, Falconer gave much time to determining the Indian fossils in the British Museum and the East India House, especially the large collections sent home by Cautley. In response to memorials from the presidents of the chief scientific societies and from the British Association, a government grant of 1,000l. was made for preparing for exhibition the Indian fossils in the British Museum, which are still unarranged and embedded in rock, and Falconer was appointed to superintend the work in December 1844. The East India Company gave him employment and pay as if he were still in India, and at his instance a series of coloured casts of the most remarkable Siválik fossils was prepared, and sets were presented to the principal European museums. The publication of a great folio illustrated work, the ‘Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis,’ edited by Falconer, was commenced in 1846, the plates being drawn by G. H. Ford. Within three years there appeared nine parts of the work, each containing twelve plates of great artistic excellence, 1,123 specimens being figured in them. Besides the Siválik fossils the work illustrates mammalian remains from the Nerbudda valley, the Irrawaddy, and Perim Island. Of the letterpress unfortunately only one part was completed. His work in the British Museum was urgent, and the time remaining did not enable Falconer to complete the immense work of making references in his full and conscientious style. He was compelled to return to India in 1847, in order to avoid losing his commission and his right to a pension, having been appointed successor to Dr. Wallich as superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden and professor of botany in the Calcutta Medical College. To complete here the account of the ‘Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis’ Falconer found himself unable to continue his part of the work in India, and on his return to England in 1855 he found that many of the unpublished plates had been erased from the stones on which they had been drawn. He set himself to complete the work. Bad health and the extended studies required combined to postpone it till too late. Proof copies of seventeen of the unpublished plates, with outline tracings for the remaining plates, have been deposited in the library of the geological department of the British Museum (Natural History), South Kensington. A description of the plates, both published and unpublished, was compiled after Falconer's death from his notes and memoranda by Dr. Murchison, and inserted in Falconer's ‘Palæontological Memoirs,’ vol. i., and also published separately in 1868.
In February 1848 Falconer entered upon his new duties at Calcutta. An important part of his work consisted in advising the government of India on all matters relating to the vegetable products of India. In 1850 his valuable report on the teak forests of Tenasserim was published in the ‘Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government.’ In 1852 he published in the ‘Journal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India’ a paper ‘on the quinine-yielding Cinchonas and their introduction into India,’ recommending their trial in Bengal and the Neilghiris. Numerous other botanical papers were contributed by him to the same society. He selected and arranged the botanical exhibits of Bengal for the London Exhibition of 1851. In 1854 he made a catalogue of the fossils in the museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was published in 1859. Meanwhile he was very successful as a teacher of botany in the medical college.
Falconer retired from the Indian service in the spring of 1855, and on arriving in England at once resumed his palæontological researches, visiting almost every museum in Western Europe, and everywhere making notes on mammalian specimens, principally the proboscidea and rhinoceroses. He utilised his enforced residence in South Europe in the winters of 1858–61 through ill-health in the furtherance of his studies, and in 1862 he communicated to the British Association at Cambridge an account of the newly discovered pigmy fossil elephant of Malta. Researches on the fauna of the ossiferous caves of Gower led him in 1860 to prove that elephas antiquus and rhinoceros hemitœchus were members of the cave fauna of England. In the same year he determined that the Bovey Tracey lignite deposit was of miocene age. In 1861 he gave important evidence before a royal commission on the sanitary condition of India, in which he distinguished carefully between the removable and irremovable causes of disease. In his latter years he spent much time in examining the evidences as to the antiquity of man, which he had been led to anticipate in India in 1844. His examination in 1858 of the flint implements discovered in the valley of the Somme caused him to urge Mr. Prestwich to investigate the subject, which that geologist followed up with most important results. In fact, every current question about fossil mammalia and prehistoric man was investigated and commented upon by Falconer in a patient,
