London, Edinburgh, &; Dublin Philosophical Magazine. 439 



repaired the minarets of the great mosque of Aurengzebe, which 

 threatened destruction to the neighbouring houses ; he drained the 

 city, and made a statistical survey of it, and illustrated by his own 

 beautiful drawings and lithographs the most remarkable objects 

 which the city and its neighbourhood contains ; he made a series of 

 experimental researches on the depression of the wet-bulb hygro- 

 meter ; he determined, from his own experiments, the values of the 

 principal coins of the East, and formed tables of Indian meterology 

 and numismatics, and of the chronology of the Indian systems, and 

 of the genealogies of Indian dynasties, which possess the highest 

 authority and value. 



When transferred to Calcutta, he became the projector and editor 

 of the " Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal," a very voluminous 

 publication, to which he contributed more than one hundred articles 

 on a vast variety of subjects, but more particularly on Indian coins 

 and Indian Palaeography. He first succeeded in deciphering the 

 legends which appear on the reverses of the Greek Bactrian coins, 

 on the ancient coins of Surat, and on those of the Hindoo princes of 

 Lahore and their Mahomedan successors, and formed alphabets of 

 them, by which they can now be readily perused. He traced the 

 varieties of the Devanagari alphabet of Sanscrit on the temples and 

 columns of Upper India to a date anterior to the third century before 

 Christ, and was enabled to read on the rocks of Cuttack and Gujarat 

 the names of Antiochus and Ptolemy, and the record of the inter- 

 course of an Indian monarch with the neighbouring princes of Per- 

 sia and Egypt ; he ascertained that, at the period of Alexander's 

 conquests, India was under the sway of Boudhist sovereigns and 

 Boudhist institutions, and that the earliest monarchs of India are not 

 associated with a Brahminical creed or dynasty. These discoveries, 

 which throw a perfectly new and unexpected light upon Indian 

 history and chronology, and which furnish, in fact, a satisfactory 

 outline of the history of India, from the invasion of Alexander to 

 that of Mahommed Ghizni, a period of fifteen centuries, are only 

 second in interest and importance, and we may add likewise in diffi- 

 culty, to those of Champollion with respect to the succession of 

 dynasties in ancient Egypt. 



These severe and incessant labours, in the enervating climate of 

 India, though borne for many years with little apparent inconveni- 



