1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bloomfield, Maurice

BLOOMFIELD, MAURICE (1855–⁠), American Sanskrit scholar, was born on the 23rd of February 1855, in Bielitz, Austrian Silesia. He went to the United States in 1867, and ten years later graduated from Furman University, Greenville, South Carolina. He then studied Sanskrit at Yale, under W. D. Whitney, and at Johns Hopkins, to which university he returned as associate professor in 1881 after a stay of two years in Berlin and Leipzig, and soon afterwards was promoted professor of Sanskrit and comparative philology. His papers in the American Journal of Philology number a few in comparative linguistics, such as those on assimilation and adaptation in congeneric classes of words, and many valuable “Contributions to the Interpretation of the Vedas,” and he is best known as a student of the Vedas. He translated, for Max-Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, the Hymns of the Atharva-Veda (1897); contributed to the Bühler-Kielhorn Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde the section “The Atharva-Veda and the Gopatha Brahmana” (1899); was first to edit the Kauçika-Sūtra (1890), and in 1907 published, in the Harvard Oriental series, A Vedic Concordance. In 1905 he published Cerberus, the Dog of Hades, a study in comparative mythology.