page_title: Edward Hamilton Aitken
section_title: Natural history
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Hamilton Aitken / Natural history
caption_attribution_description: Haplocheilus lineatus = Aplocheilus lineatus (Valenciennes, 1846)
context_page_description: Edward Hamilton Aitken was a civil servant in India, better known for his humorist writings on natural history in India and as a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society. He was well known to Anglo-Indians by the pen-name of Eha.
context_section_description: He explored the jungles on the hills near Vihar around Bombay and wrote a book called The Naturalist on the Prowl. His writing style was accurate and at the same time amusing to his readers. He studied most of his subjects in life and was very restricted in his collecting.
  In response to an appeal for information on rats due to plague in Bombay, he wrote an article for The Times of India (19 July 1899), in which he threw a flood of light on the subject of the habits and characteristics of the Indian rat as found in town and country. He wrote that Mus rattus, the old English black rat, which is the common house rat of India outside the large seaports, has become, through centuries of contact with the Indian people, a domestic animal like the cat in Britain.
  In 1902 he was deputed to investigate the prevalence of malaria at the Customs stations along the frontier of Goa, and to devise means for removing the position of the Salt Peons who were affected by malaria in these places. During this expedition he discovered a new species of anopheline mosquito, which after identification by Major James, I.M.S., was named after him as Anopheles aitkeni. During his service he took to writing the Annual Reports of the Customs Department and was frequently thanked for the same. Reviewers have commented that these reports are enlivened by his witty literary touch. In the last two years of his service he was put in charge of The Sind Gazetteer. On completion of this work he retired to Edinburgh. He died after a short illness on 25 April 1909.
  He refused to be depressed by life in India. "I am only an exile," he remarks, "endeavouring to work a successful existence in Dustypore, and not to let my environment shape me as a pudding takes the shape of its mould, but to make it tributary to my own happiness." He therefore urged his readers to cultivate a hobby.
  He wrote:
  It is strange that Europeans in India know so little, see so little, care so little, about all the intense life that surrounds them. 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. &. S., an unequal strife with the insupportableness of an ennui-smitten life. Why, if he would stir up for one day the embers of the old flame, he could not quench it again with such a prairie of fuel around him. 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. What such a one needs is a hobby. Every hobby is good—a sign of good and an influence for good. 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. That all my own finer feelings have not long since withered in this land of separation from 'old familiar faces,' I attribute partly to a pair of rabbits. 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. But if such considerations cannot lead, the struggle for existence should drive a man in this country to learn the ways of his border tribes. 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. It is not a question of scientific frontiers—the enemy invades us on all, sides. We are plundered, insulted, phlebotomised under our own vine and fig-tree. 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 
caption: Scooties Haplochilus lineatus
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