We regret to record the death of Professor Friedrich Max
Milner. Born in 1823 in Anhalt-Dessau, then a centre of much cultivation, and the son of a considerable poet, the young German learned everything, and finally, after acquiring many languages, devoted himself to Oriental study. He became a great Sanskrit scholar, and obtained from the East India Company an appointment as translator of the Vedas and other early Sanskrit literature, which maintained him for twenty years. From 1849 he held various professorships at Oxford, all of which he used to diffuse knowledge on the favourite study of his life,—comparative philology. There can be no doubt that being a born litterateur with many languages at command he exaggerated the aid which com- parative philology can give to history ; but though he was fanciful and scattered his great powers over too many sub- jects, he was a really learned man, and his series of "Sacred Books of the East" is a monument of his prodigious and fruitful industry. The depth of his scholarship has been doubted, but he knew much, and never buried any of his knowledge. We should ourselves say, after reading many of his speculations, that his mind, though wonderfully nimble and capable of appreciating many ideas at once, lacked penetration; but perhaps only a profound student of the Asiatic philosophies could be sure of the justice or falsity of that opinion. The objection sometimes raised to him because he was a German is absurd. Nobody can "beat the bounds" of the parish of Learning.
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