E. H. Aitken

Edward Hamilton Aitken (1851-1909), who wrote under the pen name Eha, was a civil servant in British India, a naturalist and a founding member of the Bombay Natural History Society, the institution through which much of India's early conservation science was organised.

Aitken was born at Satara in the Bombay Presidency, the son of a Free Church of Scotland missionary, and took his degrees at Bombay University before teaching Latin at Deccan College in Pune from 1870 to 1876. He worked at the Society's museum, was the first joint editor of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, served as secretary of its insect section and for a time as its president.

His lasting contribution was as much to attitudes as to science. Against the prevailing habit of studying birds and butterflies through shot specimens and collections, he argued for observing them alive, writing that he hoped to help others come to know animals without killing them, and he studied the life histories of butterflies rather than pinning them. His popular books, among them The Tribes on My Frontier, Behind the Bungalow and The Common Birds of Bombay, used humour to persuade Europeans in India to take an interest in the natural life around them. He also put natural history to practical use: keeping an aquarium, he identified a small surface-feeding fish, Aplocheilus lineatus, as an effective consumer of mosquito larvae and stocked Bombay's ornamental fountains with it to stop them breeding mosquitoes, a method afterwards adopted widely across India.[2]