Yule, SIR HENRY

Yule, SIR HENRY, Orientalist, was born at Inveresk near Edinburgh in May 1820. His father was a major in the Company's army, and after passing through Addiscombe he himself received a cadetship in the Bengal Engineers (1840). He served successively on the north-east frontiers, on the great irrigation works in the North-western Provinces, in surveys on the mountains between Arakan and Burma, as secretary to Sir Arthur Phayre's mission to Ava in 1855, and during the Mutiny in maintaining the railway communication up the Ganges valley. He was Secretary to Government in the Public Works department from 1858 till 1862, when he retired with the rank of colonel, and the year after was gazetted C.B. (civil). He lived some time at Palermo, sat on the Indian Council from 1875 until 1889, was made K.C.S.I. on his retirement, and died in London, December 30, 1889. He had received the LL.D. degree from Edinburgh in 1884, and was a corresponding member of the French Institute. He had been president also of the Hakluyt Society and of the Royal Asiatic Society. His articles in the Journals of the Geographical and Asiatic Societies were numerous, and he wrote valuable Introductions for Wood's Source of the Oxus (1872), Delmar Morgan's translation of Prejevalsky's Mongolia (1876), and Gill's River of Golden Sand (1880). His Cuthay and the Way Thither (Hakluyt Society, 2 vols. 1866) was a collection of all the minor notices of China before the 16th century, and prepared the way for his magistral work, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian (2 vols. 1871; 2d ed. 1875). His next great work was the Anglo-Indian Glossary (1886), perhaps better known under its alternative title of Hobson-Jobson, with the collaboration of the philologist Dr Burnell, who died in 1882. His last work was the exhaustive notes (Hakluyt Society, 2 vols. 1888-89) contributed to the Society's reprint (1887) of the MS. Diary (1681) of William Hedges.