Proceedings of the Seventeenth Anniversary Meeting of the Society, held on the 9th of May, 1840 : the Right Hon. C.W. Williams Wynn, M.P., President, in the chair.
- Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.
- Date:
- [1840]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Proceedings of the Seventeenth Anniversary Meeting of the Society, held on the 9th of May, 1840 : the Right Hon. C.W. Williams Wynn, M.P., President, in the chair. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![1840.] that it was his anxious purpose to have prosecuted this inquiry. The purpose was worthy of him; and if success were attainable, it would have been his portion. His untimely decease has interrupted all reasonable prospect of the question being immediately determined; but it is to be hoped that the zeal which it was one of his great merits to have had the power of animating in others, will not expire with him. His example may still incite the former associates of his labours to persevere, in the confidence that they cannot better honour his memory than by imitating his example. Towards the end of 1838, the extreme and incessant application with which Mr. Prinsep had laboured for six years, with little apparent feeling of inconvenience, certainly with no expression of a feeling of fatigue, no sensible diminution of zeal or vigour, produced effects, the more alarming that they were as unexpected as severe. After struggling against them for some time in vain, it became absolutely necessary to relinquish all business whatever, and seek for relief in rest and change of scene. The remedy came too late. The energy that had borne up against such unusual exertion so long, was entirely exhausted. Mr. Prinsep arrived in England in 1839, in a state of extreme prostration of bodily and mental strength; and although from his time of life, which was under forty, his constitutional vigour, his equability of disposition, and his temperate habits, his friends flattered themselves that they might augur favourably of the result, yet he continued to linger, without any permanent indication of amendment throughout the year; and has at last sunk beneath the fatal effects of a too prodigal and prolonged expenditure, and consequent exhaustion of the intellectual powers. Mr. Prinsep w^as, at the time of his quitting India, Secretary of the Mint Committee, and of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Member of the Asiatic Society of Paris, and of various scientific and literary associations at home, on the Continent, and in America. Since his return to Europe, he had been elected Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Berlin, and of the Institute of France. Among the subjects of peculiar interest which have occupied the atten- tion of the Society during the past year, no one possessed a higher value than the report of the progress made by Major Rawlinson in deciphering the arrow-headed inscriptions on the rocks at Bisitun. As historical monu- ments concurring with, and confirming the genealogy of Darius, the son of Hystaspes, given by Herodotus, and the great events of that monarch’s adventurous reign, they are invaluable ; while the comparative certainty which now attends the development of the cuneiform clusters of signs, and the concurrence of Major Rawlinson with Professor Lassen, and Monsieur Burnouf, as to the powers of those symbols, hold out the best hope that all the information which the inscriptions in that character, so widely diffused, may be supposed to contain, will ere long, be laid before the world. With a highly praiseworthy desire of accuracy and certainty, Major](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22394254_0011.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
