Sir William Hunter laid much stress on the necessity of stating the authority on the strength of which any statement is made and of the propriety of avoiding anything like libels on persons or classes. In 1871 Sir W. Hunter was appointed Director General of Statistics to the Government of India. In this capacity he was to be a central guiding authority whose duty it was to see that each of the Provincial Gazetteers contained the materials requisite for the comparative statistics of the Empire. As some of the Bombay District Accounts were incomplete and as it was thought advisable to embody in the District Accounts the results of the general Census of 1872, it was decided, in October 1871, that pending the completion of the census the Gazetteer work should be suspended and that when the results of the census were compiled and classified a special officer should be appointed for a period of six months to revise and complete the drafts. In October 1871, pending the compilation of the census returns, Mr. Crowe was appointed Assistant Collector at Sholápur and the Gazetteer records were left in a room in the Poona Collector's Office. In September 1872 the whole of the Gazetteer records, including thirty-one articles on British Districts and Native States, were stolen by two youths who had been serving in the Collector's Office as peons. These youths finding the Gazetteer office room unoccupied stole the papers piece by piece for the sake of the trifling amount they fetched as waste paper. Search resulted in the recovery in an imperfect state of seven of the thirty-one drafts. The youths were convicted and sentenced to a year's imprisonment in the Poona Reformatory. In 1873 Mr. Francis Chapman then Chief Secretary to Government took the preparation of the Gazetteer under his personal control. And in June 1873 Mr. James M. Campbell, C.S., was appointed Compiler. An important change introduced by Mr. Chapman was to separate from the preparation of the series of District Manuals certain general subjects and to arrange for the preparation of accounts of those general subjects by specially qualified contributors. The subjects so set apart and allotted were: