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History
Born in 1800 or 1801; educated at Macclesfield grammar school until 1814; Richmond, Surrey, 1814-1816; nominated for the Bengal civil service, 1816; East India Company training college, 1817; arrived in Calcutta early in 1818; studied Sanskrit and Persian at Fort William College; assistant commissioner of Kumaon, 1819; assistant residentship at the Nepalese capital, Katmandu, 1820; acting deputy secretary in the Persian department of the Foreign Office, 1822; Katmandu, residency postmaster, 1824; assistant resident, 1825; studied Nepalese institutions and commerce and became proficient in Nepali and Newari, 1820-1821; retained at his own expense a group of local research assistants, training himself and some of his staff as naturalists, specializing particularly in ornithology; he described 39 new mammalian and 150 bird species and published 127 zoological papers; collector of Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit and Tibetan and was the first to reveal to the West the Sanskrit literature of northern, or Mahayana, Buddhism; acting resident, 1829-1831; resident, 21 January 1833, resigned from the civil service and returned to England, 1844; returned to India in 1845; continued work on zoology and the physical geology of the Himalayas, but concentrated in particular on the ethnology of the peoples of northern India, relying extensively on linguistic comparisons; the botanist Joseph Hooker stayed with him from 1848 to 1850; left India in 1858 and retired to Gloucestershire; died 1894. Member of the Royal Asiatic Society (1828), elected a fellow of the Linnean Society (1835) and of the Royal Society (1877), made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (1838), and awarded the honorary degree of DCL at Oxford University (1889).