Proby Thomas Cautley

Proby Thomas Cautley was an English civil engineer and palaeontologist born January 3, 1802, in Raydon, Suffolk, England, who died January 25, 1871, in London, and who was commissioned into the Bengal Presidency artillery in 1819, supervised the restoration of the Doab Canal from 1825 to 1843, and became Superintendent-General of Canals in British India by 1836. He conceived and supervised construction of the Ganges Canal, a roughly 350 mile irrigation work completed in 1854 that at the time carried the greatest discharge of any irrigation canal in the world, and he founded Thomason College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee in 1847, India first engineering college. Alongside his engineering career he conducted fossil expeditions in the Siwalik Hills with Hugh Falconer beginning in 1832. He was knighted in 1854, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1846, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1837 jointly with Falconer; the plant genus Cautleya is named in his honor.