Wallace, _Anti-trinitarian Biography_, vol.
ii. (1850). (A. Go.*)

BLANE, SIR GILBERT (1740-1834), Scottish physician, was born at
Blanefield, Ayrshire, on the 29th of August 1749. He was educated at
Edinburgh university, and shortly after his removal to London became
private physician to Lord Rodney, whom he accompanied to the West Indies
in 1779. He did much to improve the health of the fleet by attention to
the diet of the sailors and by enforcing due sanitary precautions, and
it was largely through him that in 1795 the use of lime-juice was made
obligatory throughout the navy as a preventive of scurvy. Enjoying a
number of court and hospital appointments he built up a good practice
for himself in London, and the government constantly consulted him on
questions of public hygiene. He was made a baronet in 1812 in reward for
the services he rendered in connexion with the return of the Walcheren
expedition. He died in London on the 26th of June 1834. Among his works
were _Observations on the Diseases of Seamen_ (1795) and _Elements of
Medical Logic_ (1819).

BLANFORD, WILLIAM THOMAS (1832-1905), English geologist and naturalist,
was born in London on the 7th of October 1832. He was educated in
private schools in Brighton and Paris, and with a view to the adoption
of a mercantile career spent two years in a business house at Civita
Vecchia. On returning to England in 1851 he was induced to enter the
newly established Royal School of Mines, which his younger brother Henry
F. Blanford (1834-1893), afterwards head of the Indian Meteorological
Department, had already joined; he then spent a year in the mining
school at Freiburg, and towards the close of 1854 both he and his
brother obtained posts on the Geological Survey of India. In that
service he remained for twenty-seven years, retiring in 1882. He was
engaged in various parts of India, in the Raniganj coalfield, in Bombay,
and in the coalfield near Talchir, where boulders considered to have
been ice-borne were found in the Talchir strata--a remarkable discovery
confirmed by subsequent observations of other geologists in equivalent
strata elsewhere. His attention was given not only to geology but to
zoology, and especially to the land-mollusca and to the vertebrates. In
1866 he was attached to the Abyssinian expedition, accompanying the army
to Magdala and back; and in 1871-1872 he was appointed a member of the
Persian Boundary Commission. The best us