2 Death of Major- General Cunningham. [Jan. 



guishecl father, Allan Cunningliam, the Nithsdale poet, and assistant of 

 Chauti-ey. He was educated at Chfist's Church Hospital, and after 

 passing through Addiscombe, obtained his commission as second-lieute- 

 nant in the Bengal Engineers in June 1831. From the first he seems 

 to have held good appointments, being on the staff of the Governor- 

 General, Lord William Bentinck in 1834, and afterwards employed 

 on special duty in Oadh. He was no less fortunate in taking part 

 in the hard fighting of those days. He was present at the battle of 

 Punniar, and played a prominent part as field engineer in both of the 

 Sikh wars. In 1846 he was appointed commissioner to demarcate the 

 boundaries of Kashmir on the Tibetan side. During the Mutiny 

 he found himself in Burma, whence he was suminoned to be chief 

 engineer in the North- Western Provinces, after the pacification. He 

 retired from active service in 1862. But his connection with India was 

 not yet ended. He now took the lead, officially, of those undertakings, 

 in which he had already been privately engaged for many years, and 

 with which his name will remain prominently and permanently con- 

 nected. In November 1861, he had laid before Lord Canning a memo- 

 randum on the investigation of the arch geological remains of Upper 

 India. This led, early in 1862, to his appointment as Archaeological 

 Surveyor to the Government of India. Though, in a cold fit of parsi- 

 mony, the department was abolished in 1866, it was fortunately re- 

 established in 1870 in a much moi'e extended form, and General Cun- 

 ningham, who had spent the intervening period in England, was recalled 

 to be at the head of it as Director-General of the Archeeological 

 Survey of India. In this post he served in India till 1885, when he 

 finally retired to England after a total service of more than fifty years. 

 The results of the labours of himself and his assistants to the Archajo- 

 loo-ical Survey were published in twenty-three volumes of reports, 

 to which was added, in a separate volume, a general index, compiled 

 by Mr. V. A. Smith. But these voluminous reports by no means 

 exhausted his energy. Besides numei'ous contributions to the Journals 

 of this Society and the Numismatic Society of London, he published 

 in 1854, a description of the Bhilsa Topes or Buddhist monuments of 

 Central India, with ati account of the opening and examination of 

 the various groups of Topes around Bhilsa, and in 1871 his Ancient 

 Geography of hidia of wbich, however, only the first volume has ap- 

 peared, dealing with the Buddhist period, and including tlie cam- 

 paio-ns of Alexander and the travels of Hiuen Tsiang. In 1877 he 

 brought out — what was again intended to be the first of a series under 

 the title of Corpus Inscriptiomini Indicarnm — an edition of the Inscrip- 

 tions of AsoTia ; in 1879, a handsome quarto, with plates, on the 8tnpa of 



