629 



every attempt to relieve the misery, the ignorance, the unjust restraints 

 of anyportionof mankind, found in him a strenuous advocate and ready 

 agent. His childlike simplicity, genuine kindness of heart, and untiring 

 religious earnestness were such as well suited his kindred with 

 Bernard Gilpin, " the Apostle of the North," from whom, through 

 his mother, he derived his descent. He was bom at Carlisle in 1759, 

 and died at the age of 78. 



Henry Thomas Colebrooke, member of the Supreme Council of Cal- 

 cutta, was one of those extraordinary men whom our Indian empire has 

 produced ; and who show the animating effects of the great scene in 

 which they are there placed, by the variety of subjects to which they 

 extend their attention, and by the vigour with which they combine 

 speculative and practical employment. Mr. Colebrooke went to 

 India as a writer in 1782, and about 1792 began to attend pecu- 

 liarly to Sanscrit literature. A little later we find him beginning to 

 enrich the Asiatic Researches with a series of memoirs on the religion, 

 the literature, and, above all, the science of the Hindoos. In this 

 department his labours on the Zodiac of the Indians*, and on their 

 notions of the Precession of the Equinoxes and the motions of the 

 Planetsf, are highly deserving of notice ; as were at a later period 

 the account of the Indian Algebra, given in his translations of the 

 Lilawati and Vijaganita. But Mr. Colebrooke was also ready to con- 

 tribute a share in sciences with which we are more nearly concerned. 

 He took a lively interest in the correction of errors respecting the 

 physical geography of India, and was one of the first to declare (in 

 1815) his opinion that the Himalaya mountains were higher than the 

 Andes, an opinion soon afterwards fully confirmed. He also was 

 one of the first to enter upon a subject, to which we may now look 

 with the greatest hope. The first part of vol. i. of our New Series 

 of Transactions (published in 1822) contains two papers by him, one 

 upon the geology of the valley of the Sutledge, which had been ex- 

 plored by Lieut. Gerard ; the other upon the north-east of Bengal, 

 where Mr. D. Scott had noticed various rocks, and, among the rest, 

 a deposit which contained fossils, resembling, as he conceived, those 

 of the London clay. I shall have occasion, in the course of this ad- 

 dress, to refer to a recent repetition of this observation of an identity 



* Asiat. Res., vol. ix. t Ibid., vol. xii. 



