this up to the 19th
of October, and on the 28th he was taken to his well-earned rest. One
of the last letters that I read to him was a letter from Messrs.
Longmans, his lifelong publishers, urging the publication of the
fragments of the Autobiography that he had then written.

My father's object in writing his Autobiography was twofold: firstly,
to show what he considered to have been his mission in life, to lay
bare the thread that connected all his labours; and secondly, to
encourage young struggling scholars by letting them see how it had
been possible for one of themselves, without fortune, a stranger in a
strange land, to arrive at the position to which he attained, without
ever sacrificing his independence, or abandoning the unprofitable and
not very popular subjects to which he had determined to devote his
life.

Unfortunately the last chapter takes us but little beyond the
threshold of his career. There is enough, however, to enable us to see
how from his earliest student days his leanings were philosophical and
religious rather than classical; how the study of Herbart's philosophy
encouraged him in the work in which he was engaged as a mere student,
the Science of Language and Etymology; how his desire to know
something special, that no other philosopher would know, led him to
explore the virgin fields of Oriental literature and religions. With
this motive he began the study of Arabic, Persian, and finally
Sanskrit, devoting himself more especially to the latter under
Brockhaus and Rueckert, and subsequently under Burnouf, who persuaded
him to undertake the colossal work of editing the Rig-veda.

The Autobiography breaks off before the end of the period during which
he devoted himself exclusively to Sanskrit. It is idle to speculate
what course his life's work might have taken, had he been elected to
the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit; but he lived long enough to
realize that his rejection for that chair in 1860, which was so hard
to bear at the time, was really a blessing in disguise, as it enabled
him to turn his attention to more general subjects, and devote himself
to those philological, philosophical, religious and mythological
studies, which found their expression in a series of works commencing
with his _Lectures on the Science of Language_, 1861, and terminating
with his _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_, 1897,--"the
thread that connects the origin of thought and language with the
origin