Augustus Lewis Schlötzer, another German literary adventurer in the Russian service, and for a time secretary of Müller, was a more generally accomplished linguist. Unlike Müller, he was a skilful Orientalist; and he was versed, moreover, in several of the Slavonic languages with which Müller had neglected to make himself acquainted, before engaging in the compilation of his great collection of Russian Historians. For this he availed himself of the assistance of his secretary Schlötzer. Gottlieb Bayer of Königsberg, one of the earliest among the scholars of Germany, author of the _Museum Sinicum_, also occupied for some years a chair at St. Petersburg; but he is better known by his ferocious controversial writings, than by his philological works. A much more distinguished scholar of modern Germany, almost entirely unknown in England, is Christian William Buttner. He was born at Wolfenbüttel in 1716, and was destined by his father (an apothecary) for the medical profession; but, although he gave his attention in the first instance to the sciences preparatory to that profession, the real pursuit of his life became philology, and especially in its relation to the great science of ethnography. It was a saying of Cuvier’s, that Linnæus and Buttner realised by their united studies the title of Grotius’s celebrated work, “De Jure _Naturæ_ et _Gentium_;”—Linnæus by his pursuit of _Natural_ History assuming the first, and Buttner, by his _ethnological_ studies, appropriating the second—as the respective spheres of their operations. In every country which Buttner visited, he acquired not only the general language, but the most minute peculiarities of its provincial dialects. Few literary lives are recorded in history which present such a picture of self-denial and privation voluntarily endured in the cause of learning, as that of Buttner. His library and museum, accumulated from the hoardings of his paltry income, were exceedingly extensive and most valuable. In order to scrape together the means for their gradual purchase, he contented himself during the greater part of his later life with a single meal per day, the cost of which never exceeded a silber-groschen, or somewhat less than three half-pence![140] It may be inferred, however, from what has been said, that Buttner’s attainments were mainly those of a book-man. In the scanty notices of him which we have gleaned, we do not find that his power of speaking foreign languages was at all what might have been expected from the extent and variety of his book-knowledge. But his services as a scientific philologer were infinitely more important, as well as more permanent, than any such ephemeral faculty. He was the first to observe and to cultivate the true relations of the monosyllabic languages of southern Asia, and to place them at the head of his scheme of the Asiatic and European languages. He was the first to conceive, or at least to carry out, the