scholarly journals A memoir of Colonel Sir Proby Cautley, F. R. S., 1802-1871, engineer and palaeontologist

1980 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-225 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Executive Director ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
British Museum ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
The World ◽  
Indian Mutiny ◽  
The Ganges

Proby Cautley was the sole projector and executive director of one of the largest irrigation canals ever built in the world, the Ganges Canal, the first new cut made by the British in India. In this respect, he was among the pioneers of perennial canal building, begun in Uttar Pradesh and present day Pakistan in about 1820 and continued well into this century. In addition, he was responsible with Dr Hugh Falconer (F.R.S. 1845) for making, describing and classifying an enormous collection of sub-Himalayan fossils. He presented the collection to the British Museum, where it forms, along with the book describing it, an important source of reference for Indian palaeontology. For his merit as an engineer and palaeontologist, Cautley was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1846. He was knighted for his services to India and was further honoured by his selection in 1858 to serve on the newly formed Council of India, which ruled India in place of the East India Company after the Indian Mutiny. A small number of surviving letters, and the corpus of his printed papers and books, combined with the resources of genealogy and military records, enable us to reconstruct the story of his life, a life interesting in its own right and because it typifies the life of many of those army officers engaged in the nineteenth century in public works in India.

A Society against Ugliness

2020 ◽  
pp. 200-217
Author(s):  
Anton Howes
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Private Company ◽  
The World ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Great Exhibition

This chapter examines the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is considered an industrial audit of the world that included exhibits from Britain's empire and other foreign nations. It talks about the East India Company, a private company that exercised control over almost all of the Indian subcontinent that provided displays of the products of India in the Great Exhibition. It also explains the aim of the Great Exhibition, which was to reveal to merchants and manufacturers in Britain the kinds of raw materials that might be imported for Englishmen to work upon. The chapter highlights the Royal Society of Arts' activities over the previous century, which focused on the spread of information instead of awarding premiums for exploiting new resources. It describes how the products of Britain's colonies brought attention to merchants and manufacturers in Britain itself.

Book reviews: The enlightening of science

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-260
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Polite Culture ◽  
George Iii ◽  
English Culture ◽  
Research Director

John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture . Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi+324, 111., £35.00. ISBN 0521-45077-2 Anyone familiar with the Royal Society’s portrait of Sir Joseph Banks will readily believe that he dominated a large segment of English ‘useful knowledge and polite culture’ between his return from the glamorous voyage with Cook to the South Seas and Australia in 1771 and his death in 1820. Very rich, an intimate of George III, and, after one battle in 1783-4, an autocratic President of the Royal Society, he acted as patron, research director and employer to a multitude of botanists, natural historians, proto-anthropologists, agriculturalists and ‘improvers’. In this work, based upon John Gascoigne’s mastery of the epistolary material in the Banks Archive (now in the British Museum of Natural History awaiting complete transcription and publication), together with much printed material, Banks is given his due place in English culture. The author clearly shows that Banks, while not much of a scientist himself, greatly helped to develop much interesting, useful and progressive knowledge about the world and man.

The Principals and Their Part

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. Weiner ◽  
Chris Stringer
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Geological Society ◽  
Previous Evidence ◽  
Animal Remains ◽  
Scientific World ◽  
Objective Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Merit

The objective evidence for the deception at Piltdown was overwhelming. The frauds extended to every aspect of the discovery—geological, archaeological, anatomical, and chemical—so that proof could be adduced three or four times over. Moreover, every time a new line of investigation was applied, it confirmed, as we have seen, what all previous evidence had established. The two Piltdown ‘men’ were forgeries, the tools were falsifications, the animal remains had been planted. The skill of the deception should not be underestimated, and it is not at all difficult to understand why forty years should have elapsed before the exposure; for it needed all the new discoveries of palaeontology to arouse suspicion, and completely new chemical and X-ray techniques to prove the suspicion justified. Professor Le Gros Clark, Dr. Oakley, and I wrote in our report that ‘Those who took part in the excavation at Piltdown had been the victims of an elaborate and inexplicable deception’. Inexplicable, indeed, for the principals were known to us as men of acknowledged distinction and highly experienced in palaeontological investigation. Woodward, in 1912, was a man of established reputation. Dawson enjoyed a solid esteem. Teilhard de Chardin was, of course, only at the beginning of his palaeontological career. Knowing their place in the world of science, we felt sure that these investigators, whose integrity there was not the slightest reason to question, had been victims—like the scientific world at large—of the deception. Arthur Smith Woodward (who was of an age with Dawson) at the time of the discovery had been Keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum since 1901, the year of his election to the Royal Society, and had scores of papers of very great merit to his credit. His work on fossil reptiles and fishes was on a monumental scale, and he had also made discoveries in mammalian palaeontology. He was without doubt the leading authority in his own field. His position was abundantly recognized by many awards and by appointment to many high offices—for example, Secretary, and in the Piltdown years successively Vice-President and President, of the Geological Society.

scholarly journals World Bank’s 2012 Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment: A View from Nepal

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 6-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. B. Pun
Keyword(s):  
Population Density ◽  
Flood Control ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Agricultural Productivity ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Poverty Level ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Ganges

The World Bank’s 2012 Ganges Strategic Basin Assessment (GSBA) is an interesting but contentious document with a wealth of information. The basin has a population of 656 million; and 47 percent of Indians, 576 million, live in this basin. Nepal’s three bordering States of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal with a population of 199, 104 and 91 million respectively have a staggering combined population of 385 million, far greater than that of the USA. The Ganges basin has the world’s highest population density and, as a consequence, poverty level borders that of Sub-Sahara. This is India’s Hindu cow belt where water is increasingly getting scarce.With the strategic resource, water, getting scarce in the Ganges, the Bank’s GSBA has some startling findings: storages in Nepal store ‘significantly little’ water, so flood control in India is ‘very limited’. Storages in Nepal can ‘double lean season flows’, but agricultural productivity in India is ‘currently very low’ from such augmented flows. The Bank believes that ‘hydropower and trade’ is ‘significant’ and negotiation ‘simpler than previously thought’. The Bank recommends that Nepal push her hydropower development on a fast track. Many believe it is not the ‘significant’ power trade that counts. What really counts is whether or not the traded Energy will be at a Significant Rate. By pushing Nepal’s significant hydropower, the Bank is advocating a policy whereby India avail free lean season water stored in Nepal’s fertile valleys submerged for perpetuity. I n the Bank’s opinion, as India’s agricultural productivity is currently very low and flood control very limited, Nepal’s downstream benefits are also very low. Nepal is, thus, very disappointed with the Bank’s such Indo-centric GSBA report.Hydro Nepal: Journal of Water, Energy and EnvironmentVol. 12, 2013, JanuaryPage: 6-12DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hn.v12i0.9025Uploaded Date : 10/28/2013 

The fate of the bird specimens from Cook's voyages possessed by Sir Joseph Banks

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Medway
Keyword(s):  
Royal College ◽  
British Museum ◽  
John Hunter ◽  
The World ◽  
Extensive Collection

Joseph Banks possessed the greater part of the zoological specimens collected on James Cook's three voyages round the world (1768–1780). In early 1792, Banks divided his zoological collection between John Hunter and the British Museum. It is probable that those donations together comprised most of the zoological specimens then in the possession of Banks, including such bird specimens as remained of those that had been collected by himself and Daniel Solander on Cook's first voyage, and those that had been presented to him from Cook's second and third voyages. The bird specimens included in the Banks donations of 1792 became part of a series of transactions during the succeeding 53 years which involved the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and William Bullock. It is a great pity that, of the extensive collection of bird specimens from Cook's voyages once possessed by Banks, only two are known with any certainty to survive.

Vitruvian Character: The Case of the Egyptian Museum

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Khaled Asfour
Keyword(s):  
Local Community ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Spatial Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
The World

In Vitruvius’ treatise, what makes good architecture is its ability to communicate to the public particular messages that reflects the program of the building with spaces and components arranged in an orderly way. According to Vitruvius these messages when acknowledges by the public the building posses strong character. This research discusses this idea by reflecting on the 1895 competition of the Egyptian Museum project. Marcel Dourgnon, the French architect of the winning scheme, showed profound understanding of character resulting in a building that had positive vibe with the local community.  Today Vitruvius’ idea is still living with us. Norman Foster succeeded in upgrading the British Museum in a way that addressed all cultures of the world through his grand atrium design.  Similarly, Emad Farid and Ramez Azmy revived the presence of the Egyptian Museum in public cognition.  Spatial experience that evokes similar perceptions to all its visitors is a timeless piece that transcends cultural boundaries.

scholarly journals IX. Observations upon so much of Monsieur le Monnier the younger's memoir, lately presented to the Royal Society, as relates to the communicating the electric virtue to non-electrics; by Wm. Watson, F. R. S

1746 ◽  
Vol 44 (482) ◽  
pp. 388-395
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Royal Academy ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The World is much obliged to Mons. le Monnier for the many Discoverics he has made of the Power of Electricity; though the Reason of my troubling you with this Paper at this time, is my differing with that Gentleman in the Conclusions which he deduces from several of the Experiments contain’d in his Memoir lately presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris , his own Extract of which was lately communicated to the Royal Society .

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