Clarke, HYDE

Clarke, HYDE, an English financier and philologist, born in London in 1815, was employed as a civil engineer in the improvement of Morecambe Bay and Barrow, and next in the promotion of telegraph and railway service in Upper India. He became cotton councillor in Turkey, and in 1868 founded the Council of Foreign Bondholders, whose affairs he administered for years. A promoter of the Anthropological Institute and the Press Fund, he died 1st March 1895. His writings include books and pamphlets on railways, foreign loans, banking, mythology, and comparative philology, especially the native American languages and their supposed connection with those of the Old World. Unfortunately his views are much more original than sound, and most of his generalisations have failed to commend themselves to really scientific philologists. Among his books are The Pre-Hellenic Inhabitants of Asia Minor (1864), The Mediterranean Populations from Autonomous Coins (1882), &c.