Page:Men of the Time, eleventh edition.djvu/766

 MAJOR— MALAN.

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at Oxford," 1871 j and " Lectures on the Early History of Institutions/' 1875 ; and " Dissertations on Early Law and Custom ; chiefly selected from Lectures delivered at Oxford/' 1883. On April 28, 1883, he was elected a corresponding member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, in the place of the late !Ealph Waldo Emerson.

MAJOR, RicHABD Henbt, P.S.A., and member of many home and foreif^ learned societies, born in London in 1818, was placed in charge of the maps and charts in the Printed Book Department of the British Museum in Jan., 1844, and in Jan., 1867, the collection was raised into a Department, of which Mr. Major was appointed "Keeper." He was the Honorary Secretary, from 1849 tiU 1858, of the Hakluyt Society, for which he edited ''Se- lect Letters of Christopher Colum- bus," published in 1847; "The History of Travaile into Virginia Britannia, by W. Strachey, first Secretary of the Colony/' in 1849 ; ''Notes upon Russia," which he translated from the Latin of Her- beristen, in 1851-2; and wrote Introductions to " Mendoza's China/' edited by Sir George Staunton, Bart., and published in 1853, and to " Tartar Conquerors in China/' edited by the Earl of EUes- mere, and published in 1854. He edited "India in the Fifteenth Century/' published in 1867; and "Early Voyages to Terra Austra- lis," in 1859. As a sequel to this latter work, Mr. Major read before the Society of Antiquaries, in 1861, a letter on a discovery made by him of a MS. document, by whidfi the honour of the first authenticated discovery of Australia was trans- ferred from Holland to Portugal, proving the date of that discovery to have been in 1601. In recogni- tion of the importance of these researches, Dom Pedro V., King of Portugal, conferred on Mr. Major the Knighthood of the Tower and Sword. In 1865 he communicated

to the Society of Antiquaries an elaborate memoir on a mappemonde by Leonardo da Vinci, being the earliest known map containing the name of America, now in the Royal Collection at Windsor. In 1868 he published his "Life of Prince Henry of Portugal, sumamed the Navigator, and itis Results," a work pronounced " classical " in Germany, Portugal, and England. In testi- mony of approbation of this work, Dom Luis I., the present King of Portugal, raised Mr. Major to the rank of officer of the Tower and Sword, and sent him, as a special compliment, the Collar of the Order in gold. His Majesty has since conferred on him the rank of Knight Commander of "the most ancient and noble " Order of San- tiago; and in acknowledgment of the value of the same work, the Emperor of Brazil made him a Knight Officer of the Order of the Rose of Brazil. In 1873 Mr. Major edited for the Hakluyt Society the " Voyages of the Venetian Brothers Nicol6 and Antonio Zeno to the Northern Seas in the Fourteenth Century; comprising the latest known accoimts of the lost Colony of Greenland and of the Northmen in America before Columbus." Having unriddled all the puzzles in this book, which had been declared by the learned John Pinkerton, in his History of Scotland, to be " one of the most puzzling in the whole circle of literature/' Mr. Major had the honour to receive from His Majesty the King of Italy, in recog- nition of his successful labours, the rank of Knight Commander of the Crown of Italy. Mr. Major is one of the Vice-Presidents of the Royal Geographical 'Society, having pre- viously been for sixteen years one of its Honorary Secretaries.

MALAN, The Rbv. Solomon C^SAB, D.D., son of the late Eev. Caesar Malan, D.D., of Geneva, was bom in 1812, and educated at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1887, having ob-