Alice Balfour
Naturalist and Author Alice Blanche Balfour was born on 20 October 1850 in Dunbar where she died 86 years later…
Naturalist and Author
Alice Blanche Balfour was born on 20 October 1850 in Dunbar where she died 86 years later in 1936 on 12 June 1936. She was a Victorian naturalist and one of the earliest female pioneers in the science of genetics.
Background:
She lived much of her adult life in London with her brother Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour who was at one time Prime Minister of Britain. Another of her brothers was Francis Maitland Balfour who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 27 for his work on embryology.
She developed a lifelong interest in entomology and later developed an interest in genetics and in particular the way that the patterns in Zebra skins were inherited . She had a lengthy correspondence with James Cossar Ewart Professor of Zoology at University of Edinburgh who himself had a professional interest in the development of the horse. The correspondence relates to the possibility of cross-breeding Zebra with horses to reduce the impact of Tsetse fly on horses in Africa.
Twelve Hundred Miles in a Wagon:
In 1895 after a lengthy visit to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) she published the book Twelve Hundred miles in a Waggon. The journey described in her 1895 book was undertaken by Alice Balfour, H. W. Fitzwilliam, Albert Grey and his wife, and Albert Grey’s cousin George Grey.
This book contained a lot of portraits of the landscape and the various chiefs they met along the journey across Rhodesia, and became one of the earlier publications on Zimbabwe.