Walter Samuel Millard
British naturalist

Walter Samuel Millard (1864–1952) was a British entrepreneur and naturalist who was honorary secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society, editor of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society from 1906 to 1920, co-author (with Ethelbert Blatter) of the classic, Some Beautiful Indian Trees, and the driving force behind the Mammal Survey of the Indian subcontinent conducted by the society between 1911 and 1923.
Early life
Millard, the seventh son of Rev. J.H. Millard, was born in Huntingdon, England in 1864. He came out to Bombay at age 20 to assist in the wine business of Herbert (Musgrave) Phipson, then Honorary Secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and the editor of its journal. Joining the Society in 1893, he was made assistant editor of the Journal. Upon Phipson's retirement in 1906, Millard became editor and remained so until 1920. Millard was married to a woman named Sybilla, who had a species of flying squirrel named after her, the Chindwin giant flying squirrel, Petaurista sybilla.
Journal editor and gardening
During the years of Phipson's editorship, the Journal of BNHS had emerged as the premier natural history journal in Asia. Although other excellent Asian journals in the field were being published during Millard's editorial tenure, the Journal of BNHS remained the only one with both scholarly and general interest articles. During this time the Society began to publish serial articles from the Journal in book form.
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This entry incorporates text from “Walter Samuel Millard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.