Brian Houghton Hodgson

Brian Houghton Hodgson.

Brian Houghton Hodgson (February 1, 1800 – May 23, 1894) was an early naturalist and ethnologist working in British India where he was an English civil servant.

Life and career

Hodgson was born at Prestbury, Cheshire. At the age of seventeen he travelled to India as a writer in the British East India Company. He was sent to Kathmandu in Nepal as Assistant Commissioner in 1819, becoming British Resident in 1833. He studied the Nepalese people, producing a number of papers on their languages, literature and religion.

Educational reform

During his service in India, he was a strong opponent of Macaulay and a proponent of education in the local languages and was opposed to the use of English as a medium of instruction.

No one has more earnestly urged the duty of communicating European knowledge to the natives than Mr. Hodgson ; no one has more powerfully shown the importance of employing the vernacular languages for accomplishing that object; no one has more eloquently illustrated the necessity of conciliating the learned and of making them our coadjutors in the great work of a nation's regeneration.

— Third Report on Education in Bengal, p. 200 (1838)

Ornithology and natural history

Hodgon studied all aspects of natural history around him including material from Nepal, Sikkim and Bengal. He amassed a large collection of birds and mammal skins which he later donated to the British Museum. He discovered a new species of antelope which was named after him, the Tibetan Antelope Pantholops hodgsonii. He also discovered 39 species of mammals and 124 species of birds which had not been described previously, 79 of the bird species were described himself. The zoological collections presented to the British Museum by Hodgson in 1843 and 1858 comprised of 10,499 specimens. In addition to these, the collection also included an enormous number of drawings and coloured sketches of Indian animals by native artists under his supervision. Most of these were subsequently transferred to the Zoological Society of London.

Allan Octavian Hume said of him:

Mr. Hodgson's mind was many-sided, and his work extended into many fields of which I have little knowledge. Indeed of all the many subjects which, at various times, engaged his attention, there is only one with which I am well acquainted and in regard to his researches in which I am at all competent to speak. I refer of course to Indian Ornithology, and extensive as were his labours in this field, they absorbed, I believe, only a minor portion of his intellectual activities. Moreover his opportunities in this

direction were somewhat circumscribed, for Nepal and Sikkim were the only provinces in our vast empire whose birds he was able to study in life for any considerable period. Yet from these two comparatively small provinces he added fully a hundred and fifty good new species to the Avifauna of the British Asian Empire, and few and far between have been the new species subsequently discovered within the limits he explored.
But this detection and description of previously unknown species was only the smaller portion of his contributions to Indian Ornithology. He trained Indian artists to paint birds with extreme accuracy from a scientific point of view, and under his careful supervision admirable large-scale pictures were produced, not only of all the new species above referred to, but also of several hundred other already recorded ones, and in many cases of their nests and eggs also. These were continually accompanied by exact, life-size, pencil drawings of the bills, nasal orifices, legs, feet, and claws (the scutellation of the tarsi and toes being reproduced with photographic accuracy and minuteness), and of the arrangement of the feathers in crests, wings, and tails. Then on the backs of the plates was preserved an elaborate record of the colours of the irides, bare facial skin, wattles, legs, and feet, as well as detailed measurements, all taken from fresh and numerous specimens, of males, females, and young of each species, and over and above all this, invaluable notes as to food (ascertained by dissection), nidification and eggs, station, habits, constituting as a whole materials for a life-history of many hundred species such as I believe no one ornithologist had ever previously garnered. ...
Hodgson combined much of Blyth's talent for classification with much of Jerdon's habit of persevering personal observation, and excelled the latter in literary gifts and minute and exact research. But with Hodgson ornithology

was only a pastime or at best a parergon, and humble a branch of science as is ornithology, it is yet like all other branches a jealous mistress demanding an undivided allegiance ; and hence with, I think, on the whole, higher qualifications, he exercised practically somewhat less influence on ornithological evolution than either of his great contemporaries. ...

Charles Darwin in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication when discussing the origin of the domestic dog, mentions that Hodgson succeeded in taming the young of the Canis primaevus, an Indian wild dog, and in making them as fond of him and as intelligent as ordinary clogs. Darwin was also indebted to Hodgson's writings for information on the occurrence of dew-claws in the Tibetan mastiff, and for other details of variations which he observed in the cattle, sheep, and goats of India.

Hodgsonia is a genus of cucurbits named after Hodgson. His close friend, Sir Joseph Hooker named a species of Rhododendron after him Rhododendron hodgsoni. Several species of bird including Prinia hodgsonii are named after him.

Return to England

Hodgson resigned in 1844 and returned to England for a short period. In 1845 he settled in Darjeeling and continued his studies of the peoples of northern India. In 1858 he again returned to England and settled in the Cotswolds. He died at Alderley.

References

• Smith, M. A. 1941. Fauna of British India. Reptilia and Amphibia.
• Barbara and Richard Mearns - Biographies for Birdwatchers ISBN 0-12-487422-3
• Lydekker, R. (1902) Some famous Anglo-Indian naturalists of the nineteenth century. Indian Review Vol.3:221-226
• Cocker, M. & Inskipp, C. (1988) A Himalayan ornithologist: The life and work of Brian Houghton Hodgson. Oxford University Press: Oxford. 89pp.
• Hunter, W.W. (1896) Life of Brian Houghton Hodgson. John Murray: London. 390pp. Scanned book

External links

• Natural History Museum, London