Page:Sir Thomas Munro and the British Settlement of the Madras Presidency.djvu/19



was born in Glasgow on May 27, 1761. His father, Alexander Munro, was a merchant trading chiefly with Virginia, and his mother was sister of Dr. Stark, a well-known anatomist of that day. Thomas was the second child of a family of five sons and two daughters. In his infancy a severe attack of measles caused partial deafness; to this deafness he refers in his first letter from India, and to the increase of it, as he advanced in life, he makes frequent allusion in the correspondence of his later years.

Munro passed from the Grammar School to the Glasgow University, which he entered when he was about thirteen, remaining in it for nearly three years. At college he was distinguished in mathematics and chemistry, and was besides a great reader of history and literature apart from his collegiate course. Evidence of his literary taste and wide reading is disclosed in