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

Abstract

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.