Andrew Smith (zoologist)

Sir Andrew Smith (3 December 1797 to 11 August 1872) was a British surgeon who also worked as an explorer, ethnologist and zoologist. He was born in Hawick in Roxburghshire and entered the Army Medical Services in 1816, three years before he took his M.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 1819. His medical career in the army is the thread that ties him to this atlas, because it carried a trained physician into the field and into natural history. He is considered the father of zoology in South Africa, having described species across a wide range of animal groups in his major work, Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa.