Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Günther, Albert Charles Lewis Gotthilf
GÜNTHER, ALBERT CHARLES LEWIS GOTTHILF (1830–1914), zoologist, was born at Esslingen in Würtemberg 3 October 1830, the elder son of Friedrich Gotthilf Günther (died 1835), bursar of estates under the council of Esslingen, by his wife, Eleonora Louise, daughter of Ludwig Friedrich Nagel, pastor of Vaihingen. He came of an old-established Swabian family, and through his mother was descended from Eberhard im Bart, the founder of Tübingen University. Educated at the gymnasium of Stuttgart and on the Stift at the university of Tübingen, he was trained for the ministry and took holy orders and the degrees of M.A. and Ph.D. in 1852. But his natural bent inclining rather towards zoology, he obtained permission to attend the courses of Professor Rapp and to proceed to a medical degree. He also studied at the university of Berlin under Johannes Müller, and at that of Bonn, where he formed a friendship with Charles Milner, the father of Lord Milner. Three years later he graduated in medicine at Tübingen, publishing at the same time his Handbuch der medizinischen Zoologie (1858), somewhat in advance of its times. Already in 1853 he had worked out a painstaking faunistic account of the fishes of the Neckar. In 1857, having made the acquaintance of (Sir) Richard Owen [q.v.] and Dr. John Edward Gray [q.v.], respectively superintendent of the natural history collections and keeper of the zoological department of the British Museum, he was invited to prepare a catalogue of the amphibia and reptiles in the Museum. In July 1862 he was appointed on the staff of the Museum and remained in its service for thirty-three years, being keeper of the zoological department in succession to Gray from 1875 to 1895. He became naturalized as a British subject when he entered the service of the Museum.
Günther was a devoted and learned systematic zoologist, author of over four hundred memoirs which range over a wide field; and at the same time he had an enthusiastic interest in living creatures, in the care of which he was unusually successful. He possessed a remarkable knowledge of mammals, of birds, and especially of the lower orders of vertebrates, in regard both to their anatomical features and their habits and life-history. Thus he was able to supply Darwin with so much information respecting the nuptial peculiarities and the reproduction of the lower vertebrates, that the great naturalist wrote: ‘My essay [i.e. Descent of Man, vol. ii, c. 12], as far as fishes, batrachians, and reptiles are concerned, will be in fact yours, only written by me’ [Letters, vol. iii, 123]. In the same way Günther's work on the Geographical Distribution of Reptiles (1858), taken in conjunction with that of the ornithologist, Dr. P. Lutley Sclater, on a similar subject, paved the way for the work of Alfred Russel Wallace [q.v.] on the geographical distribution of animals (1876). In addition to valuable monographs, including studies of such important types as sphenodon and ceratodus, Günther was the author of an admirable Introduction to the Study of Fishes (1880), a treatise that has been of great value to students. Other notable pieces of work were his great Catalogue of Fishes in the British Museum (eight volumes, 1859–1870), his Reptiles of British India (1864), Fische der Südsee (three volumes, 1873–1909), Gigantic Land Tortoises (1877), and his Deep-sea Fishes of the ‘Challenger’ Expedition (1887), in which he distinguished the chief bathymetrical zones of the ocean by the character of their fish fauna.
Günther was the founder, in 1864, and first editor of the Record of Zoological Literature, an invaluable bibliography of new contributions to the science. He had an important share in the development of the natural history collections of the British Museum, the specimens in which were increased in number from one million in 1868 to two and a quarter millions in 1895. He was responsible for the safe removal of all the collections to their new home at South Kensington in 1883, and for the erection of a special spirit museum for the custody of an extensive series of spirit preparations for the use of students. To him also is due the credit of establishing the zoological library which forms an important adjunct to the national collections. It was his object to stimulate travellers and collectors to visit zoologically unknown regions, and so to help on the exploration of the world, especially of remote islands and inland waters. He was vice-president of the Royal Society for 1875–1876 and president of the biological section of the British Association in 1880; he was also president of the Linnean Society (1898–1901), and received the gold medal of the Royal Society (1878) and of the Linnean Society (1904). He died at Kew 1 February 1914.
Günther was a fine type of the accurate systematic zoologist—learned, indefatigable, and disinterested, with a high standard of workmanship; he was also an accomplished field-naturalist, though the circumstances of his professional life did not bring this side of his equipment into prominence.
Günther married twice: first, in 1868 Roberta (died 1869), daughter of John McIntosh, of St. Andrews; secondly, in 1879 Theodora Dowrish, daughter of Henry Holman Drake, of Fowey, Cornwall. He had two sons, one by each marriage. His elder son, Robert Theodore, was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1896.
A bronze medallion portrait by Frank Bowcher is in the Natural History Museum.
[Günther Family Records, 1910; History of Collections in the Natural History Departments of the British Museum, vol. ii, Appendix, 1912; Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. lxxxviii, B, 1914–1915; private information.]