Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 4.djvu/286

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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 Cuttock and Gujarat the names of Antiochus and Ptolemy, and the record of the intercourse of an Indian monarch with the neighbouring princes of Persia and Egypt ; he ascertained that, at the period of Alexander's conquests, India was under the sway of Boudhist sove- reigns 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 satisfac- tory outline of the history of India, from the invasion of Alexander to that of Mohammed Ghizni, a period of fifteen centuries, are only second in interest and importance, and we may add likewise in difficulty, 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- ence or effect, finally undermined his constitution ; and he was at last compelled to relinquish all his occupations, and to seek for the restoration of his health in rest and a change of scene. He ar- rived in England on the 9th of January last ; but the powers both of his body and his mind seemed to have been altogether worn out and exhausted ; and after lingering for a few months, he died on the 22nd of April last, in the forty-first year of his age. The cause of literature and archaeology in the East could not have sustained a severer loss.

Sir Anthony Carlisle was born at Stillington, in the county of Durham, in the year 1768. After commencing his professional education at York, under the care of his uncle, he became a student at the Hunterian School of Anatomy, in Windmill Street, under Dr. Baillie and Mr. Cruikshank, where he attracted the particular notice of John Hunter. He subsequently became a resident pupil of Mr. Henry Watson, one of the most eminent surgeons in the me- tropolis, whom he succeeded at the Westminster Hospital in 1793. In 1800 he communicated to our Transactions a paper " On a Pecu- liarity in the Distribution of the Arteries sent to the Limbs of Slow- moving Animals." This was followed by many others on various points of comparative and human anatomy, including his papers " On Muscular Motion," and " On the Arrangement and Mechanical Action of the Muscles of Fish," which formed the Croonian Lectures for 1804 and 1806. He was the author likewise of many communications in the Transactions of the Linnean and Horticultural Societies and in other contemporary journals, on different branches of natural history and physical science.

"An Essay on the Connexion between Anatomy and the Fine