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,
