English orientalist, born in Bengal, India, on the 17th of January 1830; educated at St. Andrews and Halle universities. He held the professorship of Arabic in University College, London (1855); in Trinity College, Dublin (1856); University of Cambridge (1870). In 1869 he became assistant keeper in the MS. department of the British Museum. He edited and wrote a large number of papers, monographs and books, chiefly upon oriental subjects, among which are, edited in Arabic, The Travels of Ibn Jubair (Leyden, 1852); Al-Makkari’s Analectes (1855); El-Mubarrad’s Kamil (Leipsic, 11 parts, 1864–82). He published The Book of Jonah in Four Oriental Versions—Chaldee, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic—with Glossaries (London, 1857); Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, Collected and Edited from Syriac MSS. in the British Museum, with an English Translation and Notes (1865); The Homilies of Aphraates, “the Persian Sage” (in Syriac, 1869); and many others. He contributed the article on Syriac Literature of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He died in Cambridge on the 22nd of May 1889.
