Hugh Nevill was born on 19 June 1847, and came to Ceylon, as it was then called, at the age of seventeen as Private Secretary to the Chief Justice.
Hugh Nevill had a younger brother named Geoffrey, who was a malacologist and a malacological author who worked in the Indian Museum, in Kolkata.
Nevill was a pioneer student of the origin and development of Sinhala, the main language of Sri Lanka, and of the dialects of the Veddhas, Rodiyas, and Vanniyas.
His interests and publications were extremely broad, covering anthropology, archaeology, botany, ethnology, folklore, geography, geology, history, mythology, palaeography, philology, and zoology.
[2] During his 32 years in Sri Lanka, Nevill assembled a collection of 2,227 prose and verse manuscripts, mostly in Sinhala, Malayalam, Tamil, and Pali, now kept at the British Library.