Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/259

 bore half the expense of the choir of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

From 1897 to 1913 Lord Ardilaun was president of the Royal Dublin Society, which for close on two centuries has taken the leading part in the development of the resources of Ireland; the publication of the Society's history was due to his initiative and liberality. When he retired from the presidency, owing to failing health, he received a presentation and address, and the Society commissioned Sir William Orpen, R.A., to paint his portrait, which hangs in the board-room.

In 1900 Lord Ardilaun became the proprietor of the Dublin Daily Express and the Dublin Evening Mail which were carried on in the unionist interest. He was so staunch a conservative that in 1898 he declined to accept the lieutenancy of the county of Dublin, because it was offered to him by a conservative lord-lieutenant of Ireland (Earl Cadogan) at a moment when the loyalists of Ireland felt bitterly that their cause had been betrayed by Lord Salisbury's government.

Lord Ardilaun's principal seat was at St. Anne's, Clontarf, where he and Lady Ardilaun entertained generously and received in 1900 a visit from Queen Victoria. A large part of each year he spent on his Galway estate at Ashford, where he gave employment on a large scale, making roads and planting trees. He was an expert in forestry, and by his judicious choice of trees transformed and beautified the countryside for miles round. He also maintained for many years a steamer on Lough Corrib between Cong and Galway for the benefit of his tenants and the neighbourhood.

Lord Ardilaun died, without issue, 20 January 1915 at St. Anne's, Clontarf, and was buried in the mortuary chapel attached to the church of All Saints which he had built on his county Dublin estate. He was succeeded, as third baronet, by his nephew, Sir Algernon Arthur Guinness (born 1883).

 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 233