52 Sir William Hunter (1840–1900), a member of the Indian Civil Service and a prolific scholar of Indian culture with a broad range of interests from the religious to the phil-ological. In addition to compiling the Gazetteer of India and the Annals of Rural Bengal over many years, he authored A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868) and A Guide to the Orthography of Indian Proper Names, with a List Showing the True Spelling of All Post Towns and Villages in India (1871). The 20 vol-umes of his Statistical Account of Bengal were published between 1875 and 1877 [Editor].