From 'The Great Moghuls' by Bamber Gascoigne pg 37-38 and 42:

He[Mughal Emperor Babur] was occupied at this time in linking in narrative form the jottings which he had made throughout his life as a rough diary, but he also found time for a magnificent and very detailed forty page account of his new acquisition--Hindustan. In it he explains the social structure and the caste system, the geographical outlines and the recent history; he marvels at such details as the Indian method of counting and time-keeping, the inadequacy of the lighting arrangements, the profusion of Indian craftsmen, or the want of good manners, decent trousers and cool streams; but his main emphasis is on the flora and fauna of the country, which he notes with the care of a born naturalist and describes with the eye of a painter--an interest and a talent which would be very precisely inherited by his great grandson, Jahangir.

He separates and describes, for example, five types of parrots; he explains how plantain produces banana; and with astonishing scientific observation he announces that the rhinoceros 'resembles the horse more than any other animal' (according to modern zoologists, the order Perisodactyla has only two surviving sub-orders; one includes the rhinoceros, the other the horse). In other parts of the book too he goes into raptures over such images as the changing colors of a flock of geese on the horizon, or of some beautiful leaves on an apple tree. The sensitivity with which he observed his own reactions in love extends also to his observations of nature..........

The emperor died on December 26,1530. His progression with all its ups and downs from tiny Ferghana to Hindustan would in itself ensure him a minor place in the league of his great ancestors, Timur and Jenghiz Khan; but the sensitivity and integrity with which he recorded this personal odyssey, from buccaneer with royal blood in his veins revelling in each adventure to emperor eyeing in fascinated amazement every detail of his prize, gives him an added distinction which very few men of action achieve.

And his book itself became a powerful and most beneficial source of inspiration to his descendants. Avid readers of family history, they found here the most personal expression of their own tradition. In certain respects they consciously imitated Babur; Jahangir wrote a very similar book about his own life, Shah Jahan deliberately copied Babur's gesture of pouring away his wine before a decisive campaign.

Even more important, for several generations the Great Moghuls instinctively followed Babur's concept of a ruler, which by the standards of the time was decidedly liberal. Again and again in his memoirs he demonstrates the belief that defeated enemies must be conciliated rather than antagonized if they are to be ruled effectively afterwards, and that one's own followers must be prevented by rigid discipline from victimizing the local population. It was a belief which would play an important part in the great days of the Moghul empire.