MAUPERTUIS
MAX MULLER
complete works fill twenty-nine volumes
{1908-10). Unhappily his constitution
was ruined, and lie died, prematurely,
under the shadow of mental disease. His
works sufficiently reflect his disdain of
religion. D. July 7, 1893.
MAUPERTUIS, Pierre Louis Moreau
de, F.R.S., French mathematician. B. July 17, 1698. Ed. College de la Marche, Paris. He served in the army from 1718 to 1723, and was then affiliated geometrician of the Paris Academy of Sciences. In 1725 he became associate geometrician. He was one of the first Frenchmen to adopt Newton s views, and was admitted to the English Royal Society (1728). In 1736 he was engaged to measure a degree of the meridian. He was elected to the Academy in 1743, and was in 1746 President of the Berlin Academy. A friend of Voltaire, he spent some years at Frederick the Great s Rationalistic court, and breathed its atmo sphere with ease. His works are, however, purely mathematical and astronomical, and do not discuss religion, though in 1751 he published anonymously a philosophic work which betrays an advanced Rationalism. D. July 27, 1759.
MAUYILLON, Jakob von, German writer. B. Mar. 8, 1743. Mauvillon rendered military service during the Seven Years War, and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He afterwards taught at Ilfeld, and, after 1771, at the military school at Kassel. Mirabeau induced him to write a four-volume history of Germany under Frederick the Great, and he pub lished also several anonymous translations and works of a pronounced Rationalist character (chiefly Das zum Theil einzige wahre System der Christlichen Religion, 1787). D. Jan. 11, 1794.
MAXIM, Sir Hiram Stevens, inventor. B. (America) Feb. 5, 1840. He had little education, and was early apprenticed to a coachbuilder. He passed from one mechanical industry to another, and dis-
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covered a great faculty for invention. By
1881, when he came to England, he already
had a number of important inventions to
his credit. He had a grievance against
the American Government, and brought his
idea of the " Maxim gun " to this country,
where he was naturalized. In 1894 he
constructed a flying machine. Altogether
he had more than a hundred international
patents. For many years he was a member
of the firm of Vickers Sons and Maxim.
He was knighted in 1901, and was a
Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Maxim
had a profound disdain of all religion, as
he sufficiently expresses in Li Hung Chang s
Scrap-Book (1912) and My Life (1915). D.
Nov. 24, 1916.
MAX MULLER, Professor Friedrich,
Ph.D., M.A., philologist. B. (Germany) Dec. 6, 1823. Ed. Dessau Grammar School, and Leipzig and Berlin Universities. He was a son of the poet W. Muller, but his godfather prefixed the name " Max " to Muller. After devoting four years to a profound study of Sanscrit, he went to Paris, where Burnouf induced him to prepare a new edition of the Rigveda. Before he concluded it he passed to England (1846), and the East India Com pany undertook the expense of publishing it. It was in 1848 that he settled at Oxford, and he was appointed Deputy Taylorian Professor of modern European languages. He became professor in 1854. He was Curator of the Bodleian Library 1856-63 and 1881-94. In 1859 he pub lished his History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, and in the following year he would have had the chair of Sanscrit at Oxford, but the clergy, knowing his Ration alist views, kept him out. He then turned to general comparative philology and myth ology. In 1868 a chair of comparative philology was founded for him, and he occupied it until 1875, when he undertook the control of publication of The Sacred Books of the East. Max Muller held the Prussian order Pour le merite, the Crown of Italy, the Northern Star of Sweden, 494
