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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1898.
PROFESSOR J. GEORG BÜHLER.
BY PROFESSOR A. KAEGI, ZÜRICH.1 ALL the newspapers have reported the tragic end of the famous Indologist Hofrath Dr. J. Georg Bühler, Professor in the University of Vienna. No one can help feeling the deepest sympathy with his relatives, whose sad bereavement has been rendered all the more painful ,by the melancholy circumstances attending his death. But not only the relatives and numerous friends of the departed, but also Sangkrit scholarship itself has suffered the heaviest and most unexpected lose - a loss that is simply irreparable. For Georg Bühler was more than an eminent Sanskrit scholar'; he held and has held for years the undisputed position of leader of Indian philology; he was the scholar who at the present time was the leading spirit of all researcbes relating to ancient India. May I then, as a grateful adinirer of the wonderful inan, be permitted to devote a few lines to his memory?
Bühler was born in the parsonage of Borstel near Nienburg on the Weser, and educated at the grammar school of Hannover, where H. L. Ahrens and Raphael Kühner were amongst his teachers. At Faster, 1855, he proceeded to the University of Göttingen to study Classical and Oriental antiquities, and found there sach eminent teachers as Hermann Sauppe, Ernst Curtius, Theodor Benfey, and Heinrich Ewald. After having taken his doctor's degree he went, in the autumn of 1858, to France and England, where he devoted three years to the thorough study of Vedic MSS. in the great libraries of Paris, London, and Oxford. In England he became acquainted with Professors Max Müller and Theodor Goldstücker who assisted him in many ways, and for a time he held the post of assistant librarian in Her Majesty's library at Windsor Castle.
In October, 1862, he returned to Göttingen with the intention of qualifying himself as a University lecturer. But in November he was offered a professorship at the Sanskrit College in Benares, the principal seat for the study of Brahmanical philosophy, and while the negotiations about this appointment were being carried on, he was invited to take the newly created chair of Oriental languages at the Elphinstone College in Bombay. Bühler gladly accepted the offer, and began his work at Bombay in the spring of 1863. His very first lectures on Sanskrit, Prakrit and Comparative Philology, and still more the zeal and energy with which he threw himself into the educational work at the college, making new practical arrangements for instruction in the philological department and procuring a library of books and manuscripts to be used by students and teachers, could not fail to attract the attention of the authorities, who very soon began to employ the young scholar in the Educational Department in other ways also.
As early as 1864 Bühler, together with Sir Raymond West, then judge at the Bombay High Court, was appointed by the Governor of Bombay Presidency, to compile a Digest of Hindu Law, which was to take the place of the Sastris (native scholars versed in the customary law), who until then had acted as legal advisers at the lower courts.
During the summer of 1866 he was employed at Poona as superintendent of Sanskrit studies, and in the winter of 1866-67 he travelled, by order of the Government, through the Maratha and Kanara countries, in order to search the Brahmanic libraries for important manuscripts. As the result of this very first journey Bühler brought home more than 200 old manuscripts, among them many rare and until then quite unknown works, and he lost no opportunity in pointing out to the authorities the necessity of a systematic investigation of the old, libraries.
Two years more of quiet teaching and study followed, till, early in 1869, Bühler was appointed Acting Educational Inspector for the Northern Division of the Bombay Presidency (Gajarát and neighbourhood), being thereby charged with the administration and superintendence of all elementary and secondary schools of a territory extending over about 56,000 square miles, with five millions of inhabitants. For many years afterwards the administration of the lower and secondary AngloIndian schools in that province was Bühler's principal task, which he undertook at once with that
1 Translated from an article published in the New Zürcher Zeitung.
