He was born in
Dundee, the son of Thomas Calman, a music teacher, and Agnes Beatts Maclean. He studied at the
High School of Dundee. In the scientific societies in Dundee, he met
D'Arcy Thompson. He later became Thompson's lab boy, which allowed him to attend lectures at
University College, Dundee for free. A. D. Peacock, one of Thompson's successors to the chair of Natural history at Dundee, believed this appointment came about following a letter sent by Calman in 1891 asking Thompson's advice as to applying for a post in Edinburgh. After his graduation with distinction in 1895, he took on a lecturership at the university, where he remained for eight years. When Thompson died, Calman, along with
Douglas Young, wrote his obituary notice in the
Royal Society of Edinburgh Yearbook. He later worked at the Natural History Museum, where he was appointed assistant curator of Arachnida in 1904 (replacing Pocock), became assistant curator of Crustacea and
Pycnogonida and Keeper of Zoology. In 1909, he wrote the Crustacea section in
Lankester's
Treatise on Zoology, where he introduced the
superorders
Eucarida,
Peracarida and
Hoplocarida as well as the concept of the
caridoid facies, a hypothetical ancestral
malacostracan. He wrote several of the entries about crustacea for the
Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition. He also established the current division of the
Branchiopoda into the four orders
Anostraca,
Notostraca,
Conchostraca and
Cladocera. He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1921,
St Andrews University awarded him an honorary doctorate (LLD) in 1937. He died in
Coulsdon in
Surrey on 29 September 1952. ==Publications==