259 



ings, borne with most exemplary patience and resignation, brought 

 him to the grave. He was a man of great cheerfulness of temper 

 and disposition, kind, affectionate and generous in every relation of 

 life, and justly the object of the grateful attachment and love of his 

 numerous pupils. 



Dr. Butler was the author of an elaborate edition of ^schylus, 

 with the notes and text of Stanly, and of several educational and 

 other works. He formed a very extensive library ; and his collection 

 of Aldines, which is unhappily now dispersed, was perhaps the 

 most complete in Europe. One of his last works was an interest- 

 ing memoir of Dr. John Johnstone, of Birmingham, with whom he 

 had long been connected by the bonds of the most affectionate 

 friendship. 



Mr. James Prinsep, whose brilliant career of research and dis- 

 covery has been closed by a premature death in the flower of his age, 

 was Principal Assay Master, first of the Mint at Benares, and secondly 

 of that of Calcutta, where he succeeded Professor Wilson in 1833; he 

 was a young man of great energy of character, of the most indefati- 

 gable industry, and of very extraordinary accomplishments ; he was 

 an excellent assayist and analytical chemist, and well acquainted with 

 almost every department of physical science ; a draughtsman, an en- 

 graver, an architect, and an engineer; a good Oriental scholar, and 

 one of the most profound and learned Oriental medallists of his age. 



In 1828 he communicated to our Society a paper " On the Mea- 

 surement of High Temperatures," in which he described, amongst 

 other ingenious contrivances for ascertaining the order, though not 

 the degree, of high temperatures, an air-thermometer applicable for 

 this purpose, and determined by means of it, probably much more 

 accurately than heretofore, the temperature at which silver enters 

 into fusion. 



, His activity whilst resident at Benares has more the air of ro- 

 mance than reality. He designed and built a mint and other edi- 

 fices ; he repaired the minarets of the great mosque of Aurengzebe, 

 which threatened destruction to the neighbouring houses ; he drain- 

 ed 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 metrology 

 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, 



