INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEYS. 321 



become the repository of a mass of information on the subject. The 

 first archaeologists were scholars of the type of Sir William Jones, 

 Charles Wilkins, Henry Colebrooke, Francis Gladwin, William 

 Chambers, and Colin Mackenzie*, followed by F. Buchanan-Hamilton 

 and Horace Wilson ; and the detailed investigations of these accom- 

 plished savants are admirably told in the pages of Mr. Markham's 

 " Memoir." Their labours were preceded and supplemented by a 

 most meritorious collection in six large folio volumes of aqua-tint 

 drawings (1795-1807) by the artists, Thomas and William Daniell 

 and James Wales, of the principal monuments and edifices of 

 Hindostan. 



The next conspicuous name in the history of Indian archaeological 

 research is that of James Prinsep, who became Secretary of the Bengal 

 Asiatic Society in 1832, and to whose industry and genius we owe 

 the decipherment of the edicts of the great Buddhist King Asoka. 

 Prinsep was also one of the first to discover positive dates in early 

 Indian history. His labours were seconded by Mill, Masson, 

 B. H. Hodgson, Burt, Kittoe, Postans, and others of minor fame, 

 while his zeal and scholarship have been emulated by his contem- 

 poraries and successors, the more distinguished of whom have 

 been Cunningham and Maisey in Upper India ; Meadows Taylor, and 

 Wilson in Bombay; Dr. B. Gf. Babington and Sir Walter Elliot in 

 Madras ; and Dr. Burgess for Western and Southern India. But it 

 is to James Fergusson that the elucidation of Indian architecture 

 and art is mainly due, a task for which his genius and taste 

 as well as his extensive journeys and researches over the whole 

 expanse of India had admirably qualified him. Apart from a number 

 of papers in the transactions of learned societies, he was the 

 author of an important work, entitled " History of Architecture," 

 in which Indian architecture is classified and expounded. The 

 following are the principal heads ; — 1. Prehistoric Remains, such 

 as cairns, cromlechs, and other cognate remains of unknown 

 age, constructed by an unknown people, and scattered widely in 

 different parts of India. 2. Buddhist Remains. — A wide interval 

 separates the cairns and cromlechs from the Buddhist remains, for 

 the Aryans who composed the Vedic literature built nothing that 



* Dr. Burgess, in a learned paper on " Archaeological Research in India," read by 

 him before the Oriental Congress at Stockholm, in i389, says that Mackenzie visited 

 nearly every place of interest south of the Krishna, river, and prepared over 2,000 

 measured drawings of antiquities, carefully laid clown to scale, besides facsimiles of 

 100 inscriptions, with copies of about 8,000 others in 77 volumes. Of the drawings, the 

 only portions published are those from Amravati, and in " Tree and Serpent Worship." 



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