Xlll 



of deposits associated with the Indian coal-bearing beds, by the 

 separation of the underlying or Talchjr division, and of an overlying 

 group, from the true coal measures, subsequently called, by Dr. Old- 

 ham, the Damuda beds. 



For some time Mr. H. F. Blanford. was engaged in Calcutta, in 

 charge of the Survey Office, and in palseontological work in the 

 museum, but in 1857 he was placed at the bead of a large survey 

 party that was despatched to Madras, and he was chiefly engaged 

 for the next three or four years in examining the cretaceous beds 

 near Trichinopaly and Pondicherry, some fossils from which, de- 

 scribed by Professor E. Forbes, Sir P. Egerton and Mons. A. 

 d'Orbigny, had attracted much attention. The stratigraphy and the 

 distinction of the different divisions in the field were founded on 

 palaeontological evidence, and the classification established by Mr. 

 Blanford was f ally confirmed by Dr. Stoliczka's subsequent exhaustive 

 description of the fauna. A commencement of this description was 

 made by Mr. Blanford himself, who, before he left the Indian Geological 

 Survey in 1862, published an account of the Nautilidse and Belernni- 

 tidae in the ' Palseontologia Indica.' The geology of the area was 

 described by him in the Memoirs of the Survey, to which he also 

 contributed an account of the Nilgiri Hills. 



Mr. Blanford's retirement from, the survey was due to various 

 causes, amongst which was the injury to his health produced by the 

 exposure to the climate entailed by geological surveying. Sooti after 

 leaving India he was offered the Science Professorship in the 

 Presidency College, Calcutta, by the late Mr. W. Atkinson, at that 

 time Director of Public Instruction in Bengal. This appointment 

 Mr. Blanford accepted, and after spending some months in Europe to 

 recruit his health, he joined the staff of the Bengal Educational 

 Department towards the end of 1862. He became, in 1864, one of 

 the hon. secretaries of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and about the 

 same time, partly in consequence of his duties as secretary, his atten- 

 tion was directed to meteorology.* On October 5th, 1864, Calcutta 

 was visited by one of the most destructive cyclones on record ; a 

 storm-wave rushed up the Hooghly River, and flooded the neigh- 

 bouring low lands; upwards of 40,000 human beings were drowned, 

 and a great part of the shipping in the river was wrecked. This 

 cyclone was followed within a few weeks by another, which passed 

 over Masulipatam, and the storm-wave again caused the loss of 

 about 30,000 lives. These startling disasters naturally aroused the 

 attention of the Indian Government and the public generally to the 

 necessity of systematic meteorological observations, and to the im- 



* The account of Mr. Blanford's meteorological work is by Mr. J. Eliot, his 

 successor as Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India. 



