January 28, 1897 } 
NATURE 
291 
restored his health, which had seriously suffered in 
Calcutta. Both his duties and his sport brought him 
into close contact with the people. But he was not to 
remain there long. In 1820 the Assistant-Resident at 
the Court of Nepal died, and Hodgson succeeded to the 
post. Two years afterwards he returned for a short time 
to the Secretariat in Calcutta, but in 1825 he was re- 
appointed to the Assistant-Residentship in Kathmandu. 
In 1833 he became the Resident, and remained in that 
appointment until he left the Service in 1843. 
The daily duties of such a Resident at an independent 
Court are, in quiet times, not onerous. But now and 
again, when in the never-ceasing struggles Bi ctace 
intrigue the anti-English feeling, naturally always exist- 
ing, comes to the front, the position of Resident becomes 
suddenly of importance ; his work becomes all-absorbing, | 
and constant demands are made upon his judgment, his 
tact, and even occasionally upon his personal bravery. 
Sir William Hunter is an excellent guide through the 
intricacies of the palace cabals, and sets out the 
dismal story of the deposition, exile, or murder of suc- 
cessive nominal rulers, and of the rise to power of the 
real rulers, the mayors of the palace, three out of four of 
whom came also to a violent end. Throughout these 
crises it was acknowledged on all hands (with one 
exception) that Hodgson conducted the necessary 
negotiations with wisdom, tact, and courage beyond 
praise. But that exception was the Governor General. 
When he was convinced, at last, that the Resident was 
acting less on the orders given than on his own view of 
the position, Lord Ellenborough dismissed him from 
his post, and offered him a minor appointment in Simla. 
This the sensitive spirit of Mr. Hodgson could not brook, 
and he resigned the Service in 1843. 
During his long service at Kathmandu the Resident 
had never lost an opportunity of adding to his wide 
knowledge of the history of the zoology of Nepal and 
Tibet. And when he was thus forced out of the Service, 
his name was already known and honoured throughout 
the world. Nepal had been for centuries an asylum for 
the Buddhism which had died out in its original home in 
the valley of the Ganges. There and there alone are to 
be found those Sanskrit Buddhist MSS. on which the 
Buddhism, not only of Nepal itself, but of Tibet and China, 
of Japan and the Korea, is based. No less than 423 of these 
otherwise inaccessible records of the Buddhist move- 
ment were either bought or copied by Hodgson, not for 
himself, but in order that, with a generosity as unequalled 
as was his intellectual ardour, they might be presented 
either to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, or to similar | 
learned bodies in England and France. So far as it was 
possible for one, not himself a Sanskrit scholar, to discuss 
or elucidate the problems of the history of the ancient 
faith of Buddhism, he endeavoured to do so, and spared 
neither trouble nor expense in gathering from the panics | 
of the Nepal capital such knowledge as they possessed. 
This he communicated, from his solitary outpost in the 
hills, to the Asiatic Society of Bengal ; and these results 
of his researches in what was then an almost unworked 
field aroused the enthusiastic appreciation of scholars 
throughout the world. He had hoped that the MSS. he 
presented would enable Sanskrit scholars to carry on, 
NO. 1422, VOL. 55] 
from the original sources, the researches he had thus 
begun from the mouths of living witnesses. In only one 
instance were his hopes realised. The MSS. he sent to 
Paris lured Eugéne Burnouf from his other pursuits, 
and led him to devote his genius and scholarship to those 
studies in early Buddhism which really laid the founda- 
tion of all we now know on the subject. (His first great 
work on Buddhism is dedicated to Hodgson.) Nearly half 
a century elapsed before even a catalogue appeared of 
the Hodgson MSS. in Calcutta, and that is an inaccurate 
and unsatisfactory work. The much better catalogue, 
entirely trustworthy, so far as it goes, of the Hodgson 
MSS. in the Royal Asiatic Society, had appeared a few 
years before. But no English scholar had worked at 
them. It is only in the last few years that they are 
beginning to be a little utilised, to be appreciated 
at their right value. Foreign scholars have devoted 
themselves to the work; and notably M. Senart in 
Paris has taken up, in a masterly manner, the work left 
unfinished by the premature death of Burnouf. So year 
after year the gratitude of historical students will go out 
in increasing measure to the enlightened generosity of 
the scholar who has provided for their use the largest 
body of original documents on Buddhism which, up to 
his time, had ever been gathered together either in Asia 
or in-Europe—documents whose very existence had been 
previously unknown. 
When he left the service, Hodgson, after a short stay 
in England, settled in Darjiling, and began then to take 
up seriously a quite different branch of historical inquiry 
in which he had also been always interested. This 
was the very complicated question of the non-Aryan races 
of the Himalayan valleys. He contributed numerous 
papers on the language, religion, customs, and social 
condition of these tribes to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 
His work in this field of inquiry was not only that of a 
bold pioneer, who laid down with admirable judgment 
the right method of inquiry, but has also remained in 
most instances till to-day the best that has been done, 
and, with regard to almost all the tribes with which he 
dealt, it is the foundation of all subsequent work. As 
year by year the importance of the non-Aryan element in 
all questions relating, not only to the physique, but 
also to the history of the religious and social 
ideas of the Indian peoples, becomes more and more 
recognised, the value also of this branch of Hodgson’s 
researches has been more and more appreciated. It was 
fully acknowledged at the time by those most competent 
to judge, and he was elected an Honorary Fellow 
of the Ethnological Society—a distinction then shared, 
amongst Englishmen, only by Darwin, Layard, and 
Rawlinson. 
Meanwhile, during the whole time of his residence in 
India, Hodgson never lost his interest in what was then 
called natural history. He wrote no less than eighty 
papers for scientific societies (mostly for the Bengal 
Asiatic Society) on the Himalayan mammals, and contri- 
buted more than any one else, except only Blyth and 
Jerdon, to our knowledge of the birds of India. Though 
his opportunities were confined to two of the smaller 
districts, he added fully a hundred good new species to 
the Avi-fauna of British India. “He trained Indian 
