Obituary Notices. xlv 
Yule to reconsider his future course and abandon Cambridge for an 
Indian career. 
In 1837 he went to the Indian Military College of Addiscombe, 
and passing out thence at the head of his term was appointed, 
in 1840, after a year’s residence in Chatham, to the Bengal 
Engineers. Whilst at Chatham, as his contemporary General 
Collinson writes :* “Although he took small part in the games and 
other recreations of our time, his knowledge, his native humour, and 
his good comradeship, and especially his strong sense of right and 
wrong, made him both admired and respected.” 
His earliest Indian appointment, among the Khasias, a primitive 
Mongoloid people on the north-east outskirts of Bengal, is interest- 
ing as having led to the first of his many quaint and curious notices 
of remote Eastern peoples.! 
Another literary memorial of his early days, evidence already of 
the literary instinct, was a volume on “Fortification,”! written 
while at home on furlough (1849-51), and lecturing on the subject 
at a long-vanished Edinburgh institution — the Military Academy. 
“ It may still,” his brother engineer writes, “ be read with benefit ; ” 
while for the general reader its interesting biographical notices and 
portraits of famous engineers make it very unlike the ordinary pro- 
fessional treatise. A French translation appeared in Paris in 
1858. 
Henry Yule had previously, in 1843, been at home on leave, 
when he was married to Anna Maria, daughter of General Martin 
White of the Bengal Army; and on his return to India in 1852, 
after his second furlough, his wife, owing to bad health — the result 
of an accident soon after their marriage — was unable again to 
accompany him. Between 1843 and 1849 he was serving with 
that group of distinguished engineer officers — among whom we 
recall the names of Baird Smith, Cautley, W. E. Baker, Napier 
(afterwards Lord Napier of Magdala), and Bichard Strachey (the 
last named the only survivor) — then engaged on that great and 
successful enterprise, the restoration and development of the irriga- 
tion system of the Mogul dynasty in the North-West Provinces. 
* Royal Engineers’ Journal , 1st February 1890. 
t Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal^ vols. xi. and xiii. 
J Published by Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1851. 
