152 NATURAL SCIENCE. August, 



and in other periodicals. His papers, as a rule, were far from being 

 mere descriptions of new forms ; they contained numerous notes on 

 anatomy, affinities, and habits. He published no large work, 

 although for many years he proposed to bring out an account of the 

 Nepalese bird and mammal fauna, with coloured illustrations. A 

 large number of coloured drawings that had been prepared for this 

 work by native artists under his direction were presented by 

 Mr. Hodgson, together with the types described by him and the bulk 

 of his collections, to the British Museum. In addition to these, he 

 presented numerous specimens to the Museums of Calcutta, Paris, 

 Leyden, Edinburgh, Dublin, etc. As a collector, indeed, he was at 

 the time unrivalled. In the " List of the Specimens of Mammalia in 

 the Collection of the British Museum," published in 1843, Mr. 

 Hodgson's name is attached, in the " Index of Donations," to a 

 larger number of references than any other donor's, and at this time 

 only his first contribution to the national collection had been 

 received. Subsequently, two separate catalogues of his presented 

 collections were published, one in 1846, and the other in 1863. 



A better idea of Mr. Hodgson's energy than any that can be 

 derived from lists of specimens or even from a perusal of his papers 

 is afforded by the drawings presented by him to the British Museum, 

 or, still better, by the original copies that have found an appropriate 

 resting-place in the Library of the Zoological Society of London. 

 These drawings represent many hundreds of mammals and birds, 

 and fill several large folio volumes, the same species being sometimes 

 drawn three or four times. Each sheet, besides the figure of the 

 whole animal, generally contains drawings of details of the external and 

 internal structure, and the paper is crowded with manuscript notes 

 on the localities, habits of life, breeding, nidification, and measure- 

 ments. No better example of the care with which Mr. Hodgson col- 

 lected facts could be cited than his paper " On Various Genera of 

 Ruminants," published in 1847 {J.A.S.B., xvi., p. 685). In some 

 respects he was in advance of the science of the day. He was fully 

 alive to the importance of geographical distribution, and was the first 

 to attempt a demarcation of the zones of life, resulting from differ- 

 ences of elevation, in the Himalayas. Unfortunately, his collections, 

 when incorporated with those of the British and other Museums, 

 were indiscriminately labelled Nepal, whether they came from that 

 country, from Sikhim, or from the plains of India. Serious confu- 

 sion has resulted from this mistake and from others of a similar kind. 



Mr. Hodgson's researches in Natural History were by no means 

 his only claim to recognition. He was even better known for his 

 enquiries into the languages, literature, and religion of Nepal than for 

 his study of the fauna. He has been regarded as almost the dis- 

 coverer of Tibetan Buddhism, and he certainly was the first to call 

 attention to its literature. During the years that he lived at 

 Darjiling, in the dwelling so admirably described in Hooker's 



