Alice Blanche Balfour

Alice Blanche Balfour (20 October 1850 – 12 June 1936) was a Victorian naturalist and one of the earliest female pioneers in the science of genetics.[1]

Life

Balfour was the daughter of James Maitland Balfour and was born in 1850[1][2] in Dunbar where she died 86 years later in 1936.[3] She lived much of her adult life in London[4] 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.[5]

In 1895 she published the book Twelve Hundred miles in a Waggon.[6] 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.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 Opitz, Donald L. "“Behind folding shutters in Whittingehame House”: Alice Blanche Balfour (1850–1936) and amateur natural history." Archives of Natural History 31, no. 2 (2004): 330–348. doi:10.3366/anh.2004.31.2.330
  2. ↑ 1851 England Wales and Scotland Census for Whittingham House, Whittingehame, Dunbar, Haddingtonshire (East Lothian), Scotland (subscription required)
  3. ↑ "Death at 86 of Miss Alice Balfour". The Telegraph. London. 13 June 1936. Retrieved 22 August 2014. (subscription required)
  4. ↑ 1911 Census of England Wales and Scotland - St Martins in the Field, London
  5. ↑ New Stripes Old Stripes - Zebras and the tsetse fly
  6. ↑ "Yesterday's New Books". The Standard. 12 December 1895.
  7. ↑ Balfour, Alice Blanche (1896). Twelve Hundred Miles in a Waggon (2nd ed.). London: Edward Arnold.


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