We regret to notice the death of Mr. E. W.
Lane, the translator of "The Arabian Nights" and the Koran, and the compiler of the "Arabic-English Lexicon." He was an Orientalist of unusual knowledge and experience, and a worker of a type that threatens to disappear. For nearly 50 years he worked 12 hours a day, devoting 35 of the 50 years to his lexicon, which covers 2,500 quarto pages of three columns each, and contains with every word a reference to the native lexicon from which any statement about it has been derived. Mr. Lane had not the pleasure of completing his lexicon, but it is stated that it can be finished from the manuscripts he leaves behind him. He worked almost as patiently, though for less time, at his "Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians," a book which, as an account of an Eastern people, has absolutely no rival, and quite *sur- passes any work we possess upon any province of the Indian Empire, where we need more, perhaps, than anything, a few men of Mr. Lane's stamp, the men who can interpret an Eastern people to an European one. Such work requires an unusual combination of qualities,—learning, sympathy, patience, and descriptive power, and perhaps one more qualification, poverty. Rich men will not toil like Mr. Lane.
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