Lillie, Denis Gascoigne (1888-1963), biologist

MSS.3259-3285 comprise chiefly scientific material; they include student notebooks on zoology, botany and geology (MSS.3259-3280); scientific logs from the British Antarctic Expedition (MSS.3281-3283, specifically a biological log (MSS.3281-3282) and a log of whales sighted (MS.3283), both spanning 1910-1913; an address delivered in 1913 to the New Zealand branch of the British Medical Association on Mendel's principle of heredity (MS.3284); and some notes on fish and fishing (MS.3285).

MSS.5252-5254 comprise more personal and more miscellaneous material. MS.5252 is a scrapbook kept by Lillie, containing news cuttings, photographs and miscellaneous papers, spanning the period c.1845-1910 and including cuttings (with portrait prints) on science and scientists, 1845-1901; caricatures by Lillie of lecturers and staff at Birmingham University, 1904-1905; geological photographs, 1907-1909; family photographs (including a group class portrait at United Services' College, Westward Ho!, c.1892); and ephemera from Cambridge.

1824-1915

30 items (volumes, files or bundles of papers) Volumes and loose papers; holograph and printed cuttings.

There is a broad division between MSS.3259-3285, comprising chiefly scientific material, and MSS.5252-5254, comprising more personal and more miscellaneous material. Items in the former block are arranged in chronological order of composition. The arrangement of the latter is: MS.5252, scrapbook kept by Lillie; MS.5253, loose cuttings kept by Lillie; MS.5254, very miscellaneous correspondence and papers kept by Lillie but including material relevant to earlier generations of his family.

Purchased at Stevens', London, February 1935.

Denis Gascoigne Lillie was born in 1888. He studied zoology at Birmingham University and at St. John's College, Cambridge, in the years 1903-1910. In 1910 he was appointed marine zoologist to the British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912). He died in 1963.

At Wellcome Collection:

MSS.3286-3287 comprise lectures on science delivered in Hobart and Launceston, Tasmania, by Lillie's grandfather, John Lillie D.D. (1806-1866).

At other repositories:

Further papers of Denis Gascoigne Lillie are held at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

Database description transcribed from S.A.J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1962-1973) and Richard Palmer, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts in the Wellcome Library for the History & Understanding of Medicine: Western Manuscripts 5120-6244 (London: The Wellcome Library for the History & Understanding of Medicine, 1999).