Muller, Frederick Max

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

Frederick Max (1823-1900), a noted philologist. Born at Dessau, Germany. He was the son of Wilhelm Muller, a German poet. He was educated at the University of Leipsic. He made a specialty of Sanskrit, the literary language of the ancient Hindus. In 1846 he went to London by way of Paris and laid plans for an edition of the Rig-Veda, a Sanskrit work, before the officials of the English East India Company . The company undertook to bring out the work. It appeared in several volumes from 1849-1874. He was defeated for the chair of Sanskrit in Oxford University, but in 1868 was made professor of comparative philology. He was the most noted Sanskrit scholar of the century. His published works make a long list. They cover a wide range of English and Indian subjects. The best known titles are The Science of Language, Essays on Language and Literature, Biographies of Words, Chips from a German Workshop, and A Sanskrit Grammar. He wrote an autobiography which appeared the year after his death. Max Muller was a profound student. He wrote in English. He may be regarded as a typical product of the German University. I am not going to add a chapter to that most unsatisfactory of all studies, child-psychology. It is an impossible subject. The victim--the child--cannot be interrogated till it is too late. The influences that work on the child's senses and mind cannot be determined; they are too many, and too intangible. The observers of babies, mostly young fathers proud of their first offspring, remind me always of a very learned friend of mine, who presented to the Royal Society most laborious pages containing his lifelong observations on certain deviations of the magnetic needle , and who had forgotten that in making these observations he always had a pair of steel spectacles on his nose.--Autobiography.