eir _conge_ if they would take it. But good, bad, or indifferent they
give us their company whether we want it or not."

Eha certainly found company in beasts all his life, and kept the charm
of youth about him in consequence to the end. If his lot were cast, as
it often was, in lonely places, he kept pets, and made friends besides
of many of the members of the tribes on his frontier; if in Bombay city
he consoled himself with his aquarium and the museum of the Bombay
Natural History Society. When the present writer chummed with him in a
flat on the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, he remembers well that aquarium and
the Sunday-morning expeditions to the malarious ravines at the back of
Malabar Hill to search for mosquito larvae to feed its inmates. For at
that time Mr. Aitken was investigating the capabilities for the
destruction of larvae, of a small surface-feeding fish with an
ivory-white spot on the top of its head, which he had found at Vehar in
the stream below the bund. It took him some time to identify these
particular fishes (_Haplochilus lineatus_), and in the meantime he
dubbed them "Scooties" from the lightning rapidity of their movements,
and in his own admirable manner made himself a sharer of their joys and
sorrows, their cares and interests. With these he stocked the ornamental
fountains of Bombay to keep them from becoming breeding-grounds for
mosquitoes, and they are now largely used throughout India for this very
purpose. It will be recognised, therefore, that Mr. Aitken studied
natural history not only for its own sake, but as a means of benefiting
the people of India, whom he had learned to love, as is so plainly shown
in _Behind the Bungalow_.

He was an indefatigable worker in the museum of the Bombay Natural
History Society, which he helped to found, and many of his papers and
notes are preserved for us in the pages of its excellent _Journal_, of
which he was an original joint-editor. He was for long secretary of the
Insect Section, and then president. Before his retirement he was elected
one of the Vice-Presidents of the Society.

Mr. Aitken was a deeply religious man, and was for some twenty years an
elder in the congregation of the United Free Church of Scotland in
Bombay. He was for some years Superintendent of the Sunday School in
connection with this congregation, and a member of the Committee of the
Bombay Scottish Orphanage and the Scottish High Schools. His former
minister says of him, "He wa