Coffee-planting in Wynaad declined and Alcock obtained a post at a commission agent's office in
Calcutta. This office closed soon, and he worked from 1878 to 1880 in Purulia as an agent recruiting unskilled labourers for the
Assam tea gardens. While here an acquaintance, Duncan Cameron, left him a Macmillan book by
Michael Foster Physiology Primer. This book, he wrote in his autobiographical notes, "That little book was to me what the light from heaven was to St. Paul. It set my face towards natural science." He regretted that he never got to know Michael Foster, "but throughout the rest of my life I have thought of him with the gratitude of a disciple, for his Primer and for his Textbook of Physiology which I got as soon as I had mastered his Primer. Its philosophical spirit impressed me very deeply." and became Deputy Sanitary Commissioner for
Eastern Bengal. In 1893 Wood-Mason went home and Alcock agreed to act for him during his absence. Wood-Mason died on his way to England and Alcock was appointed as the superintendent of the
Indian Museum. In 1895–96 he was on the Pamis Boundary Commission and wrote the Natural History results of this expedition. At the Indian Museum, Alcock worked on improving the public galleries of Reptiles, Fishes and Invertebrates. Sir
George King, who was the chairman of the trustees, supported him; however, after his retirement, Alcock was given little support.
Lord Curzon decided to exhibit the collections of the Indian Museum as a memorial to
Queen Victoria in 1903 and Alcock was ordered to "vacate the gallery of Fishes at a moment's notice." Alcock protested to the trustees that "it would be disgraceful to dismantle a gallery of Invertebrates which included an exhibit of the recent mosquito-malaria discoveries, at a moment when those discoveries seemed at last to have driven into the thickest British skull the great truth that the study of zoology was of some use to mankind." The gallery was spared but the library was to be cleared. These experiences caused Alcock to quit and he returned home in 1906 writing to the Government "telling him what an impossible post the Superintendentship of the Museum was and begging him to get it improved for the sake of the Science of Zoology and of my successors." In the letter Alcock wrote that Zoology was "a branch of pure science pregnant with human interest", important to the state "in matters of education, in matters agricultural and veterinary, and in the vital matter of public health." He suggested the establishment of "an
Indian Zoological Survey" with a museum and laboratory administered by zoologists along the lines of the Geological and Botanical Surveys. should ever say that I had got it altered for my own benefit." and received the Barclay Medal from the
Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1907. In 1897 he married Margaret Forbes Cornwall, of Aberdeen. ==Achievements==