Muir, JOHN, a distinguished Sanskrit scholar, was born in Glasgow in 1810, studied at the university there and at Haileybury, and at eighteen went out to Bengal to join the East India Company's Civil Service, in which he remained for twenty-five years. His last years were spent in Edinburgh, where he died, March 7, 1882. Muir was a munificent patron of learning, and himself a scholar of unusually wide intellectual and spiritual sympathies. He founded and endowed a chair of Sanskrit in Edinburgh, as well as prizes for high attainments in that language, and also provided the funds for a lecturership in comparative religion. His great work was his Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India, their Religion and Institutions (5 vols. 1858-70; 2d ed. 1868-73). Another book is Metrical Translations from Sanskrit Writers (1878).
SIR WILLIAM MUIR, his brother, was born in 1819, and at eighteen joined the Bengal Civil Service after having attended lectures at both the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. He rose rapidly in rank, was made K.C.S.I. in 1867, and was lieutenant-governor of the North-west Provinces, 1868-74, and Financial Minister to the government of India, 1874-76. After his return to England he sat on the Council of India, 1876-85, when he was elected Principal of the university of Edinburgh. Sir William Muir is an eminent Arabic scholar, and his Life of Mahomet (4 vols. 1858-61; abridged ed. 1877) and Annals of the Early Caliphate (1883) are works of solid and enduring value. Other books are The Corân, its Composition and Teaching, and the Testimony it bears to the Holy Scriptures (1878); Extracts from the Corân (1880); and The Early Caliphate and Rise of Islam, the Rede Lecture for 1881.